JPEGView

Nowadays, many pieces of software tend to display all of their functions in plain sight, and focus on providing users with features whose scope extends far beyond the initial purpose of the app. If you are looking for a lightweight and easy-to-use photo browser, then JPEGView may be the best alternative to complex proprietary offerings that the interned is filled to the brim with.

The advantages of open-source software become apparent when you least expect them. Many successful projects are worked on by volunteers in their spare time, in an effort to provide the world with free alternatives to proprietary, personal data-hungry services whose code content may never be revealed to the public.

However, when life gets in the way of the original developers who can no longer keep updating their application, the community steps in to pick up their work and give a second chance to software that would otherwise be abandoned and obsolete, all thanks to the advantages of embedding an open-source license.

One great example is JPEGView, which combines changes made to the original project that was last updated in 2018 with extra features from an unofficial fork into a package with a faster image codec and more frequent update cycles.

Thanks to its portable format, users can take the program and its custom preferences anywhere they go, without having to configure or sync it on multiple computers. When opening an image file, the app adapts its window to the exact size of the picture in order to take up less screen space on the desktop, while also giving users a rough idea of the photo’s scale and resolution.

Unlike other proprietary offerings, JPEGView displays the user interface only when you hover the mouse over the image, in order to avoid cluttering or covering the preview with buttons. In terms of controls, one can quickly navigate between files in the same folder, rotate the image at any angle and change the perspective on the spot, without having to use other editing suites.

By default, left-clicking and dragging the mouse across the image creates a selection for cropping, zooming or copying to clipboard for easily sharing snippets. Right-clicking anywhere on the photo reveals commands allowing users to open other files, start slideshows and display the location of the picture in the top-left corner to remind you in which local disk it is situated.

Setting the application in full screen and hovering the cursor in the bottom section reveals a set of transformation tools for changing the contrast, brightness and saturation of the photo at hand, which can be necessary for improving text readability or making certain objects more easily visible.

Finally, power users have the option of altering the configuration settings of the app for customization purposes, ranging from being able to increase the font size for accessibility purposes to setting the number of CPU cores to be used to minimize the performance impact.

Whether Microsoft’s latest iteration of the Fluent Design language present in Windows’ built-in Photos app does not suit your style, or you want a lightweight picture viewing utility with faster loading times, JPEGView is an excellent alternative thanks to its portability and straightforwardness.