SlimView

Image viewers have a seemingly simple task to carry out: allowing you to reliably view your photos whenever you deem necessary. That is, after all, the core functionality of an image viewer, which has remained unchanged over the years. Anything more than that is a bonus, and bonuses are always nice to have.

Windows already comes with a built-in image viewer, but that one might not be up your alley for various reasons. If you're looking for a simple third-party alternative, SlimView will be able to reliably display your photos with little effort on your part.

Though alternatives to built-in software are many, you'll still have to look out for the one that best suits your use cases. Some users may appreciate more feature-packed offerings, while others would prefer something more pared-down and lighter on functionality. To each their own, in the end, but it's good that there's something for everyone.

This image viewer keeps it simple, and the users looking for that will be happy to find out it's also quite lightweight in its operation, so only a few system resources are required to run the program. It'll display most common formats, and you can set it as your default image viewer without worrying that it may not be up to the task.

The program allows the user to freely navigate through their photos, rotate them however they want, and zoom in to check on the more minute details. It's worth noting that the tool will be able to view .RAW files, but not .DNG, .NEF, and other similar extensions, so this is still a bit of a gray area. It will, however, retrieve any image metadata your files may have, draping everything neatly in a compact window.

Users will also appreciate the Favorites Manager, which allows them to freely look through their favorite marked images. Though it would have been nice to have a sort of built-in editor, however rudimentary, that's not the case — pressing the pen-looking icon in the interface will open Microsoft Paint, allowing the user to annotate and draw over the current image.

SlimView is quite a simple one: it's a rather rudimentary image viewer, whose practical interface and lightweight nature will nevertheless be appreciated by some users.