vimage

No matter how compact, most image viewers still display pictures within a regular UI, even if it is as minimalistic as possible. If you are looking for something smaller and faster, this app may be just the thing for you.

vimage is a distinctive image viewer that does away with a GUI and displays pictures directly on your desktop. It is inspired by vjpeg, but it supports a wide range of file formats and is fully customizable.

The one thing that sets vimage apart from other similar apps is that pictures are displayed on your desktop without any border or title bar, making it a great choice for those who prefer minimalistic viewers.

You can open multiple images at once and move them around freely, cycle through all the files in a folder, rotate and flip pictures, as well as zoom in or out.

Vimage offers support for animated GIFs, and it is possible to pause them and step through the frames using hotkeys.

Once you’ve tried opening a few images, you may find that there are some things you’d like to change. Thankfully, the program’s behavior can be customized extensively.

In addition to changing the default hotkeys and specifying how images should be loaded, it is also possible to remove the default context menu items and add new ones, so users can easily make the program more suitable for their workflow.

Even though it is very lightweight, the application offers support quite a few popular formats. Images are loaded via DevIL, and you can open, among others, JPG, PNG, BMP, ICO, GIF, PSD, TGA and TIF files.

On the whole, vimage is a pretty impressive image viewer that does a great job of keeping things simple. It enables you to open pictures and animated GIFs without a classic UI, and it offers a decent set of navigation and editing features.