What image browsing program do you use?

[Roger Beck]

I have been using Photo Mechanic for a long time, for commercial work or anyone with 10's of thousands of images, especially jpg's, it used to be blazing fast, the fastest jpg thumbnail maker on the planet. I'm finding a lot of bugs and erratic behavior, not so much for jpgs, which it excels at, but tifs and psd's which take longer to read. I just accessed a 150mb psd file, Photo Mechanic took 2 minutes to render a thumbnail. With large format film scans going from 50mb to 250mb depending on size and resolution, image processing speed is important. Wondering what you use if you have a large collection of large (and small and medium but mostly large) files to fling.

[GRAYnomad]

I used to use a program I wrote myself, but it's written in VB6 which hasn't been supported for years now and I could use a new program as well.

I currently use ACDSee, and it's pretty good, but I can't import all the data from the 20,000 photos catalogued in my old program and it's just too hard to do it manually.

Anyway I though I'd do a test. I found an 810MB PSD file, moved it to an external drive and renamed it, all so there was no chance of it being cached.

When I pointed ACDSee to the folder the thumbnail rendered as fast as all the small JPEGs in the same folder. Then I double clicked on it to load the full res image. I reckon maybe 2-3 seconds and it's loaded.

YMMV of course but I have a lot of these large files and I never notice any undue lag. It has a free trial and is not very expensive to buy, so maybe that's worth looking at.

[nbagno]

Faststone image viewer https://www.faststone.org/


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[mdarnton]

Another Faststone user. The nice thing about it, aside from being a good browser, is that it has a very extensive photo editing program tucked away in it that I often use instead of PhotoShop for quick edits.

[GRAYnomad]

I've been trying FastStone for a few hours now. Great program, thanks for the heads up.

It took a while to thumbnail all the (very large) images in one folder, but then it loaded a 1GB file to full screen 1:1 res in no time at all.

Does it have any way to keyword and group images? I can't see anything.

[Roger Beck]

to be fair Photo Mechanic was faster than Fastone on a folder of jpgs and those difficult to read 16bit uncompressed tif's, but its good to have something to compare PM with.

[Alan Klein]

Irfanview.

[EBJohnson]

I was just looking at Photo Mechanic, per this thread, and I'm wondering is there a way to "ingest" and create a usable library, without moving files? Like I can in Capture one? I love that I can use it to quickly view my GX617 scans, which translates to easy viewing once I get into scanning 4x5, still waiting on a lens for my first camera... BUT, I do all my file management personally, and would prefer to not have it software managed... Maybe it's obvious, but I did't see it.

[Jim Jones]

Irfanview.

Yes, indeed! It is also faster than programs for many little routine tasks.

[Roger Beck]

"is there a way to "ingest" and create a usable library, without moving files? "

You can set the preferences to open an ingest dialog box when a memory card is inserted, but file locations are up to you. It keeps a cache of thumbnails, but they are not accessible. They have great support and documentation.

Its really robust, I had hardware and software hangups happening and are all sorted, running like a top again.