Nico's Viewer

Almost any mobile phone is capable of taking pictures with little effort, and with high quality results. These can be viewed right away, but on the computer you need to use an application. In case the one Windows puts at your disposal doesn’t quite tickle your fancy, there are various other alternatives like Nico's Viewer you can use.

On launch, the application brings up a compact main window that’s empty by default, because it doesn’t yet know what pictures you want to view. Sadly, it can only be launched through the executable, with no options to integrate it in the context menu, unless you forcefully select it through the “open with” menu.

Another disappointment you quickly encounter is the lack of support for drag and drop, which means you need to spend some time going through the browse dialog. On the bright side of things, the application supports a decent variety of image formats, such as TIF, BMP, JPG, PCX, GIF, PNG, EPS, and TGA, but GIF files aren’t animated.

There’s the possibility to set file association for the supported formats, but you still need to manually make the application your default viewer to process them correctly. With all of these limitations, it would have been useful to see at least an option to save pictures to different formats, especially with the neat support.

Last but not least, navigation can give you a hard time as well. In other words, the application can’t read the source directory of your target picture, so you need to open them one by one. What you can do is zoom in at a preset level, rotate, flip, and mirror.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Nico’s Viewer finds powerful competitors on the market of picture viewers, and even the Windows default tool can prove to be a worthy competitor. It’s intentions are good, with decent file support, but the difficult navigation style and no built-in picture browser, it can make you quickly look for alternatives.