Picture Viewer

Handling pictures nowadays is a common thing now that even mobile phones are fitted with powerful cameras. You certainly need a viewer to analyze pictures you take, and you might be looking for alternatives to the Windows default viewer. One suitable option is Picture Viewer, coming in a lightweight package, and simple design.

To provide the flexibility you need, the application can be launched right after download, which automatically implies it can be used directly from a thumb drive on other computers as well. Moreover, system registry entries aren’t changed, leaving the target computer safe and sound. Just make sure that .NET Framework is already on your PC before running the program.

It starts in a pretty compact main window, with a clean layout making it easy to identify elements you get to work with. File support is rather disappointing though, with the only two available options being JPG, and BMP. What’s more, you need to rely on the browse dialog to open them since drag and drop is not supported, and nor is the option to open an entire gallery.

Unless your screen can support a pretty high resolution, picture preview can put an end to the whole experience. In other words, pictures aren’t fitted to the main window but shown in full size, and since there’s no zoom or pan option, you have a hard time getting a good view of your pictures. There are a couple of buttons to gradually increase or decrease the window size, but the picture isn’t affected.

The picture log window can be brought up to view browse history, as well as a panel showing picture attributes. Edit options are almost missing entirely, with the only possible option to draw border, but it’s barely noticeable, with a width of one pixel, and no possible adjustment to color.

Picture Viewer is heavily underprepared to be your portable, handy viewer, let alone editor. It’s overall concept isn’t entirely out of place, but the lack of support for picture adjustment, or at least zoom and pan tools, viewing pictures is limited to something lower than your screen resolution, with a heavy impact on overall practicality.