BirdyImg

Windows already comes with an image viewer built-in, so why should you want to look to replace it? The reasons are clear enough: it isn't uncommon for Microsoft's solution to crash often, and even report bad performance, such as taking too long to load a photo. As such, users who aren't satisfied with the built-in offering have to look for alternatives.

A new alternative comes in the form of BirdyImg, a simple, lightweight image viewer, capable of displaying a number of popular formats: .JPEG, .PNG, and even .WEBP and .AVIF, among others.

This is a quite simple image viewer, whose scope is to display one's images, while consuming the least amount of resources. The Electron core might be problematic for some users, knowing its memory-hungry history, but the developer claims that the program is quite conservative with its memory allocation.

During testing, the program behaved normally. Outside a JavaScript error issue that occurred after launching the program upon installation, all went well. We were able to view our images with little effort, helped along by the drag-and-drop functionality support, as well as the intuitive navigation. The tab-based layout was also of use, as it allowed us to keep track of multiple stills at once.

When inputting an image within a directory, the software will automatically pick up on it, allowing the user to navigate to the other stills in that directory — provided there are any. A navigation panel can be toggled via the Ctrl+L hotkey, which will list your photos in a given directory, along with their thumbnails.

Users can quickly doodle over their photos by pressing the pen-looking icon. You can also brighten or darken a photo while doing this.

An image info panel can be opened through the Ctrl+I shortcut, which will provide some rudimentary data on your photos. It's worth noting that RAW photos of any kind are not supported.

BirdyImg is an image viewer that keeps it simple, and it succeeds in doing so — for the most part.