Are you looking for a photo viewer for Windows 10?
While Windows does have a built-in viewer, it won’t suffice for everyone. You might work with formats it doesn’t support, or you may find it too slow and buggy, hampering your productivity.
Alternatively, you may be looking for a photo viewer that offers additional shortcuts and functions, such as the ability to use the arrow keys to switch between images even when zoomed in.
Whether you want something lightweight and open source or are looking for a more advanced solution for sorting your professional photography shoots, there are a number of excellent options available.
Today, I will be showing you the 15 best photo viewers for Windows 10. Let’s get into it.
Best Photo Viewer For Windows 10
1. IrfanView
IrfanView is an extremely popular photo viewer, for good reason. It’s super lightweight — with a size of just 5 MB, you can use it even on slower computers.
There is both a 32 and 64-bit version. It supports Unicode and multiple languages.
It’s more than just a photo viewer, however. You can convert files, optimize and enhance your pictures, create professional-looking slideshows, and use batch processing to save time.
It supports a wide range of file formats and comes with GIF and multipage TIFF support. You can draw on your images, add arrows, straighten crooked pictures, cut and crop pictures, add overlays, and change the color depth.
You can also add filters and effects.
IrfanView supports screen capturing and scanning as well.
What makes IrfanView so great is that it is 100 percent free for noncommercial private use. That means that as long as you are not using it for your business or company, you won’t have to pay for it.
Also, it is free for educational use and for nonprofits.
All in all, while IrfanView is a simple photo viewer, it gives you everything you need in a photo viewer, thus making it to the top of the list.
2. FastStone Image Viewer
FastStone is a suite of photography tools, and one of those tools is the FastStone Image Viewer. Now available for Windows 10, it has been around since 2004, making it one of the oldest image viewers on the market.
Over the years, the creators have continually added new features and improved the tool, turning it into a powerhouse, despite its simplistic-looking website.
You can import a wide range of photo formats, such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, PSD, ICO, EPS, CUR, WMF, and many others. You can save and export pictures in a number of formats as well, including PCX, JPEG, PNG, JPEG2000, and others.
Not only that, but FastStone supports raw images from a wide range of camera models, including from brands such as Canon, Samsung, Sony, and even lesser-known ones like Leica and Fuji.
FastStone is a really compelling tool, with many amazing features. For example, it comes with many image editing capabilities, including resizing (with 11 different resampling algorithms to choose from), rotating, cropping, flipping, sharpening, adjusting the lighting, adjusting the colors, and more.
You can add filters to enhance an image, turn it into an oil painting, and more, or you can color and draw on the image and add circles, arrows, and other shapes or text.
Image management is made easy as well, with support for image tagging and drag and drop for rearranging images. You can view pictures using full-screen mode and zoom into images, or you can compare two photos side by side to help you select the more attractive one.
With batch processing, you can convert multiple images to a new format, or you can rename all images in an album.
Once you’ve selected the images you like, you can create a slideshow. There are more than 150 transitions and effects to make your slideshow more exciting, and you can also add music.
Viewing EXIF data with FastStone is easy as well.
In addition to importing pictures from your camera, FastStone allows you to scan an image or use the screen capture tool to create a screenshot.
FastStone is 100 percent free for noncommercial use. It doesn’t even show you any ads, so you can work uninterrupted, without being bothered by distractions.
3. XnView
XnView is a free photo viewer for Windows 10 that supports over 500 image formats. With both thumbnail and full-screen views, XnView makes it easy to manage and organize your gallery.
Comparing two images side by side is also possible, and you can edit images by adjusting their brightness, modifying the colors, changing the contrast, resizing the images, and cropping them — without losing any photo quality.
XnView also allows you to create slideshows, contact strips, and more. It supports metadata reading and editing, batch renaming, and more — for example, it allows you to search for duplicate files and delete them.
4. ImageGlass
Another excellent, lightweight photo viewer is ImageGlass. It doesn’t support as many photo formats as XnView, but it still supports over 70 different formats.
Using ImageGlass, you can quickly scroll through images using the thumbnail strip, view and export metadata, scrutinize all the frames of a GIF one by one, and a lot more.
ImageGlass is updated very often, so if you use it and like it, you can support the creator by making a small donation. That’s entirely optional, however, as you can use it for free.
ImageGlass is open source as well, making it a good option for those who want an open-source tool. Many of the other free tools on this list are freeware — in other words, while they are free to use, they aren’t open source.
5. Movavi
Movavi is a superb photo viewer for Windows 10. It comes with several organization and image management features that will be particularly useful for professional photographers, designers, and others who need to deal with and organize a multitude of images quickly.
It supports over 60 file formats — not as many as some other tools, but still a decent amount.
Using the filmstrip, you can quickly select and view any image. When viewing your photo gallery, you can make your thumbnails bigger or smaller.
Make them bigger to view fewer images at once but be able to see greater detail and select the best photos. Make the thumbnails smaller to view more images at once and select all the images from a day’s photoshoot and move them to a new folder.
Movavi will also automatically create photo albums based on date and GPS coordinates, allowing you to quickly find images from a certain trip or photoshoot.
Not only that, but Movavi uses facial recognition to detect who is in each photo. Then, it creates albums for each person, allowing you to quickly find selfies you took with a friend or images from a professional shoot with a specific model.
You can also add tags to your images manually. You can create custom tags such as:
- Travel
- Best friends
- Motorcycle
- Van trip
- Art class
- Or anything else
That allows you to quickly find relevant images.
Another cool feature of Movavi is that it allows you to quickly find duplicate images and delete them. That way, you can declutter your computer and stay more organized.
The Movavi photo viewer comes with basic editing features. You can straighten, flip, rotate, and crop your pics.
You can try Movavi out for free and if you wish, you can purchase a bundle with Movavi’s other products to save some money. For example, you can get it together with the Photo Editor, so you can perform advanced edits; there is also the Movavi Slideshow Maker.
6. Pictureflect
According to Pictureflect, its app has been downloaded over 400,000 times. It has both a free and a paid version, so there’s something in it for everyone.
In the past, Pictureflect was called “Basic Photo Viewer.”
The goal of Pictureflect is to provide a minimalist photo viewing experience. Using full-screen mode, you can view a picture without any sidebar or popups.
You can zoom into a photo in a few different ways, such as using the mouse wheel or your keyboard. You can even set the pictures to zoom to fill to remove empty space around an image.
Using Pictureflect, you can preview how an image will look after cropping. You can also resize images, convert one format to another, and more.
It’s also easy to create a slideshow, with options to change the background color, adjust the slideshow interval, and arrange photos in a specific order or randomly.
Pictureflect allows you to view and edit metadata, such as the date and time the photo was taken.
What are some differences between the free and the paid version? While the free version will be sufficient for most, it lacks some advanced features.
For example, while you can apply filters and effects using the free version, you’ll need Pro to adjust saturation, curves, levels, and more.
The paid version only costs a few dollars, even in more expensive countries like the US. In other countries, it is even cheaper, as the price varies by region.
You can see updated pricing for upgrading to the Pro version in the app.
7. Honeyview
Honeyview, a fast and free image viewer, is available for Windows 10 devices. With the ability to show EXIF metadata in JPEG format and display GIFs and WebP animations, it’s quite a useful tool to have.
Also, you can resize and convert the file formats of multiple images in batches, saving time and increasing your productivity. You can even view images in a zip file without extracting them first.
A wide range of formats is supported, including raw file formats.
8. Nomacs
Nomacs is a fast but powerful image viewer that is lightweight and supports several image formats. It is open source, meaning it is free to use, and the source code is available for viewing, editing, copying, and redistribution.
As it is open source, you don’t have to worry about it turning into a paid software tool at some later date. Also, unlike many of the other free photo viewers in this article, Nomacs is also free for commercial use.
You can edit images by adjusting brightness, saturation, and more.
One of the cool things about Nomacs is that you can sync two images to zoom into the same spot, so you can easily compare the two. You can also filter for images using a search term contained in their file names, and you can view metadata or extract and view photos contained in a zip file.
9. GonVisor
GonVisor is an interesting photo viewer — it supports viewing multiple photos in a sequence. For that reason, it is mostly used to view comic strips and read them in order, but you can also use it to view any image, not just comic images or manga.
Nevertheless, if you’re specifically looking for a photo viewer for manga, comics, and the like, I recommend GonVisor. It supports multiple formats, including cbr, cbz, cba, and many other formats commonly used for comics.
GonVisor comes with several features that make reading comics easy. For example, you can join an unlimited number of images from one album and turn them into a single file.
You can also open multiple images in a folder, compressed file, or even PDF. When reading a comic sequence, you can add a bookmark, so you remember where you left off.
The reading experience using GonVisor is fantastic. For example, the tool will automatically detect margins and remove them, and you can use your cursor to zoom into certain parts of the comic.
You can also set a transition time, so the tool automatically flips to the next image, and you can view two images at once, just like reading a comic book.
10. Ashampoo Photo Commander
Despite the name, Ashampoo has got nothing to do with shampoo. Instead, it’s a powerful photo viewer, editor, and organizer, all built into one app.
You can quickly browse through images, and then you can enhance them with just a few clicks. You can auto-adjust contrast, add effects, remove red-eye effects, and restore old images.
Using Ashampoo, you can turn your images into greeting cards and calendars. It’s also an image converter tool, allowing you to convert images from one format to another.
Ashampoo allows you to quickly share images on social media; it also allows you to burn them onto a CD or DVD, the old-fashioned way.
Ashampoo is entirely free to use.
11. PhotoInsight
PhotoInsight is a tool that gives you three ways to view your images. One is using a filmstrip, which allows you to quickly move from one image to another.
Another is using a photo wall, which allows you to preview the images in their native aspect ratios.
Finally, you can view each image in a single view. Using your keyboard, you can navigate from one image to another; while viewing each image, you can zoom in to get a better look.
One of the features you will find useful for organizing photos is the ability to group pictures based on properties, with many properties to choose from. You can jump from one group to another and expand or collapse a group at will.
The ability to group together images is present even when viewing images in a filmstrip.
Another way to find images, other than using the search tool present in the app, is to look at the calendar, where you will see images grouped together by date. You can even filter for images based on camera model, which can be very useful if you do shoots with different people using different cameras.
You can rate images and mark them as rejected or “picked” images, so you can later select the best pictures from a shoot. Furthermore, you can add keywords and edit the author and caption of each image.
All that is possible from the details panel. There, you will also be able to see EXIF data, GPS coordinates, and other image data.
12. Google Photos
Google Photos is a cloud-based photo viewer and manager, but it does provide an app for Windows 10 machines.
Are you worried about losing the pictures on your hard drive if you lose your computer, it gets stolen, there is a flood that damages it, or the like? Google Photos provides a quick and easy way to back up your pictures.
You can select automatic backup so that the app automatically saves your pictures to the cloud. In the app, you can view your pictures as you would on any other photo viewer — except that it will sync across all your devices on which you have Google Photos installed.
Google Photos comes with built-in photo sorting and facial recognition technology. It will automatically find people in your images and create an album for each person.
Sometimes, it might mistake the same person as two different people. However, using artificial intelligence, it will usually detect that possibility and ask if those two people are the same and if you want to merge the two albums.
Also, it will group pictures by location and make different albums for different towns, cities, and the like. It also shows you memories and throwbacks at certain time points, such as two years after a trip, and it creates memory albums it thinks you will like.
13. Apowersoft
If you’re tired of photo viewers that are slow and use up too much computing power, check out Apowersoft. It aims to use up as little CPU as possible,
People with a lot of long images, such as long comic strips, can use their mouse to scroll down and view the rest of the image. You can import raw images as well as common image formats like BMP, JPG, TIFF, and PSD.
Apowersoft is also a screenshot capture tool. Taking screenshots has never been easier, and you can annotate your screenshots with text, drawings, arrows, and more.
The tool also makes it easy to resize, rename, or convert multiple images into different formats with batch processing.
Although Apowersoft is primarily an offline tool, it does come with free cloud storage space for the purpose of image sharing. You’ll get a link to your image, so you can share your photo without sending large files and using up your bandwidth.
You can also select the social media networks you want to share on most frequently and log in to them to make sharing later a breeze.
With a simple interface and an extensive knowledge base, you won’t have any problem figuring out how to use Apowersoft.
14. JPEGView
Available on SourceForge, JPEGView is a fast image viewer that uses up minimal resources and has a minimalistic user interface. With thousands of downloads each week, it remains one of the most popular alternative photo viewers.
It’s super fast, but the downside is that it can be hard to set up, as it is portable software, meaning it doesn’t come with an installer.
15. 123 Photo Viewer
123 Photo Viewer is available on the Microsoft Store. Downloaded by one million users, it offers some amazing features, such as awesome GIF and animation support.
Not only can it play GIFs, but you can fast-forward or go back to different frames, zoom into a frame, and even save each frame as a static image. It also provides support for super quick magnification with just a click, and it supports image formats that many other image viewers do not.
For example, it supports .bpg formats, and even Apple’s .livp format! While iPhones can take “live” pictures that are basically animated pictures with several frames, allowing you to choose the best one, it is notoriously hard to play those live images on non-Apple devices.
Wrapping It Up: What Is The Best Photo Viewer For Windows 10?
I recommend IrfanView, as it is super quick, easy to set up, and entirely free.
However, FastStone is an excellent choice as well, though it doesn’t seem to be updated just as often.
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