Portable FocusOn Image Viewer

Since photo viewers are indispensable to most PC users and since, unfortunately, Windows continues to fail in its attempts to deliver a reliable, built-in tool for this task, you might want to take a look at FocusOn Image Viewer, available in both installer and portable packages.

It's a comprehensive program with many graphic-related skills, containing an image (file) explorer, viewer and plenty of editing functions. It uses code from ImageMagick, the open-source graphic editing project. In many ways, FocusOn is similar to IrfanView but we think it's less likely to scare off casual users, thanks to its neatly organized options and comfortable interface.

Photos can be rotated, flipped, cropped, resized in single or batch mode, archived, renamed in batch, as well as played in a slideshow. Extensive filetype support is provided, even to digital photos and PDFs. In fact, the app is capable of detecting EXIF info, showing it in the main window.

As far as adjustments are concerned, you can tweak the brightness, contrast, gamma, color temperature, RGB, hue, saturation, sharpness and noise reduction levels, preview and apply various filters, add frames, or embed text.

Modified photos can be easily posted to your blog, sent view email or posted on Twitter or Facebook from the "Tool" menu. Meanwhile, you can configure program settings, such as action on wheel scroll or arrow keys (e.g. go to the previous or next page), delay time between show slides, zoom quality, and others.

Although we think it's unnecessary, help information is available at the developer's website with descriptions for each command found within the UI. The key difference between the portable and installer edition is that, the no-install counterpart keeps all settings in the folder it was launched from, making it eligible for USB flash drives.

All aspects considered, FocusOn Image Viewer is a welcoming sight. Although there are numerous image viewers and editors available out there, we think this one is capable of grabbing user attention, all thanks to the intuitive UI and features.