SCS Image Viewer

Image viewers don’t really need to be sophisticated, unless you’re working on a daily basis with images, and also want to organize them in galleries in the same workspace. All the way to the other end, where simplicity is a perk of interest, SCS Image Viewer comes with a set of tools to view images, and create drawings.

First of all, the application can be launched as soon as download is done, as there’s no setup process involved to take any of your time, or effort. This enables it to be carried around on a thumb drive to have a viewer ready regardless of the PC’s you’re using. Another consequence is that system registry entries remain intact during use.

The application comes with two components, namely a viewer, and an editor. You start off in the viewer, which might start to disappoint from the first few seconds of use. Although the application tries to enhance view for resolutions lower than 400 x 800 or greater, only maximizing the main window provides a clear view of the entire picture.

There are no navigation controls whatsoever, or possibility to zoom. What’s more, loading pictures is a time-consuming process, mostly because this needs to be done one at a time, and only using the built-in browse dialog, because drag and drop operations are not supported.

As mentioned above, there’s also an editor component. However, you don’t get to work on any existing items, but rather take advantage of a set of brushes, and color options to create drawings. Sadly, the canvas is rather limited in space, while general behavior of brushes leaves a lot more room for improvement.

To sum it up, SCS Image Viewer comes with good intentions, but delivers a pretty poor set of features in both components. The viewer is rough around the edges, with an ambiguous, frustrating style, while the drawing tool doesn’t really help since you can’t work on existing pictures.