PicViewer

PicViewer

PicViewer is a perfectly nice image viewer, but it offers few features beyond the native functionality of Windows.

PicViewer integrates Windows Picture and Fax Viewer into a Windows Explorer-like interface. It is easy to navigate and offers standard Explorer features such as the ability to Favorite a folder. It also provides a bit of automation, such as a menu option to move or copy images to another directory, and the ability to create a list of external applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, to open a selected image. But the few seconds you might save using PicViewer’s pull-down menus instead of Windows’ right-click menu do not justify installing this application. This became even clearer when we realized the program does not even provide all of the features of Picture and Fax Viewer. For example, you are limited to saving files as BMP, JGP, and PNG–Windows includes TIFF and GIF as well. PicViewer does have some nice things about it. It displays Photoshop PSD files, both as thumbnails and in slideshow format. And you can choose to include subfolders in a slideshow as well as set the pause time. But it lacks any zooming or panning tools once you are viewing an image, and we could not figure out how to set an image as our desktop wallpaper, a feature the publisher suggests exists. Unfortunately, the lack of a Help file prevented us from researching this or any other problem.

If you don’t have Photoshop but frequently need to view PSD files, then PicViewer is an acceptable solution. But most users will find little to recommend it above Windows’ built-in functionality.