How to view pictures and create slideshows

Image viewers are programs that allow users to view and navigate through images in a fast and convenient way. They can handle a big variety of graphics file formats, create slideshows, and do basic, and not so basic, image editing.   The most popular image viewers are:

• IrfanView is an image viewer, editor, organizer, and converter program for Microsoft Windows.  

Create a slideshow with IrfanView

To create a slideshow, click on the File menu, select the Slideshow option. A dialog allows you to select a directory from which the files will be taken (Look in). Besides, you can use Files of type to narrow the search to one type of file (All files, JPG, BMP, etc.) Typically, you will click the Add all button to add all images in a particular directory and smash the Play Slideshow button.

IrfanView has a built-in search feature that can find files of different extension (e.g. Filename pattern: *.jpg; Search in (folder): C:\Users\YourUser\Download). To view EXIF information and other image details, go to Image, Information. If you want to draw on the picture, select Edit, Show paint dialog (you can also use the F12 shortcut).

You can rotate (Image, Rotate left/right), flip (Image, Vertical/Horizontal Flip), and resize (Image, Resize/Resample) images, adjust colors (Image, Auto adjust colors -automatic color adjustment- or Color corrections -you can manually adjust an image’s brightness, contrast, and saturation-), and apply image effects (Image, Effects).

Besides, you can take a screenshot (Options, Capture/Screenshot), remove red-eye from your pictures (Image, Red eye reduction), add a frame (Image, Add border/Frame), set the current image as your desktop wallpaper (Option, Set as Wallpaper), or create a multipage image (Option, Multipage image).

• Honeyview is a super-fast, lightweight, powerful, and free image viewer.
• FastStone is a fast, compact and innovative image viewer that supports all major graphic formats.

It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management (file tagging and drag-and-drop to copy, move or re-arrange files), comparison (side by side image comparison), red-eye removal (Edit, Red-Eye Removal), resizing (Edit, Resize/Resample), musical slideshow (View, Slide Show), color and special effects (Color, Grayscale/Sepia/Negative; Effects, Oil Painting/Lens/Watermark), and edit tools (Edit, Rotate; Color, Sharpen/Blur; Color, Adjust Colors).

Image Viewers for macOS

• qView is a cross-platform, lightweight image viewer designed with minimalism and practicality in mind. First, you should go to the File menu, select the Open option, and choose a folder to take images from. To create a slideshow, go to the Tools menu and select the Start Slideshow option.  
• XnView MP is a versatile and powerful photo viewer, image management, and image resizer. It comes with an easy to use and powerful batch conversion module.

  XnConvert is a fast, powerful and free cross-platform batch image converter. It allows to automate editing of your photo collections. You can rotate, convert, compress, resize, crop, etc. your images, pictures and photos very easily and fast.

  To create a slideshow, select Create, Slideshow. On the Filelist tab, click on Add folder to select a directory from which the files will be taken for the slideshow and smash the OK button. In order to perform a batch conversion, go to Tools, Batch convert. On the Input tab, click Add folder to select a directory from which the files will be taken for batch conversion. On the Action tab, click Add action, Image, Resize/Watermark (resizing or adding a watermark), then smash the Convert button.
• ApolloOne is a powerful image viewer to view and organize your photos.
• Picturama is a cross-platform digital image viewer and organizer.

Image Viewers for GNU/Linux

• sxiv is a simple X image viewer. To see an image, just type in the terminal: sxiv image.jpg. If you want to display all images in a directory, the command is as follows: sxiv ./misImagenes/*. Right click with the mouse and you will be able to see all the pictures in “thumbnail mode”.
• FEH is an X11 image viewer aimed mostly at console users.
• Mirage is a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer.
• nomacs is a free, open source image viewer for Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS. It supports most of the common image file formats.
• Eye of Gnome, Gwenview, and Ristretto are the GNOME, KDE and Xfce image viewers respectively.
• Geeqie is a free open software image viewer and organizer program.