I'm not looking for an editor, just a viewer. A light-weight fast-loading one with a minimalistic, bare-bones, uncluttered interface. And free. I went on the hunt for one a year or two ago and settled on ImageGlass. But then at some point it started opening images at scaled-to-fit size instead of actual size as i prefer. You can click to change view to actual size but you have to do it every. single. time., every image, it doesn't remember so as you're clicking forward & back through an image folder everything reverts back to scaled-to-fit size even if you just looked at it and chose actual-size two seconds ago. It's seriously annoying to be looking at small images and have them all open at a blown-up scaled-to-fit size. I found a fix for it then (don't remember what I had to do) and that worked for a few months but then went back to defaulting to scale-to-fit and I'm tired of it. But I'm not up to Googling up programs again, installing, testing ... so taking the easier route by asking you all for a rec. Just want a very simple uncluttered viewer I can browse my images with at actual size. (I still want a scale-to-fit option, I just don't want it as the default.)
Same. I've been a fan of Irfanview since the days when we were all concerned with slow connections and I found that Irfanview did the best job of "saving for web" to reduce file size with the least image deterioration, even better than Photoshop. I still use it almost daily for quickly pasting, cropping and sometimes notating screenshots. (I do a lot of screenshots for things like temp recording online order confirmations and names/passwords etc.) It's great for batch renaming images, too.
But as a simple uncluttered image viewer, it's still more than I am looking for and I have some specific dislikes about it when trying to use it to simply browse images.
I tried out Fastone. I spent the first while browsing Settings and randomly right-clicking on things, looking for an option to customize the toolbar to eliminate most of the icons up there to make a more uncluttered interface. Didn't find any way to do that, but, I did find a view option that will be quite useful - it's where you can see your directory tree on the left pane, your thumbs in the middle pane, and a large preview of the selected file on the right. I can definitely see using that when I want to look around in a folder of images. But as a default "open with" image viewer when I just want to double-click a random image somewhere on my computer to view it, it's way more than I want/need.
What I found, and I really hate to admit this, is that Window's built-in "Photos" app is exactly what I was looking for.
When "Photos" replaced the old 'Windows Photos Viewer" I checked it out, hated it, and never looked back. I didn't know you could just use it as a simple bare-bones viewer without having to get into the full program.
