I'm searching for a good photo viewer. Google search found a thread here from a couple years ago but I thought I'd raise the question again and see if I can get some current recommendations.

I want a photo viewer that's simple and quick. I want to be able to double click a single photo in a folder to launch the viewer, and then jump to next & previous photos via the arrow keys. I don't want to have to do CMD-A to select all files in the folder. I want a true 1:1 / 100% zoom (where 1 pixel in the image = 1 screen pixel). I don't need editing capability. I have a huge LR library for that.

Software Review Lyn Photo Viewer For Mac

I don't want an app that creates it's own database of thumbnails (that's LR again). The reason I don't want to just use LR as a viewer is because it's slow. It's a great library manager but a poor slideshow presenter.

Any suggestions? Here's what I've tried so far, and my impressions: Preview.app: Have to do CMD-A (or preselect all pictures you want to view). Doesn't have true 1:1 zoom state. (The so called 'actual size' zoom option is far more enlarged than 1:1.) Xee: Workflow felt too much like Preview. Google Picasa: Appears to create a database as far as I can tell; lacks true 1:1 zoom. Photos.app: Creates database.

(And separately, is this seriously Apple's replacement for Aperture? Ive never used Aperture but my understanding is that it was basically equivalent to LR and very highly regarded. If that's true then Photos app is a cruel joke.) ArcSoft's Photo+: This. THIS is/was the perfect image viewer. In addition to everything above, it had a filmstrip that would auto-hide/unhide and a superb exif presentation with histogram.

Unfortunately ArcSoft doesn't support it anymore. You can download it and use it as a 2 week trial but they don't appear to sell activation keys anymore. This app was exactly what I was looking for but my trial period just ended so Im out of luck now. Sequential - This is ok. I'll probably keep using this if I cant find anything better but it still has some annoying aspects: Lacks true 1:1. There's an 'Actual Size' zoom option, but again it's like a 2x or 4x overzoom, not 1:1.

Zooming manually is easy (+/- keys) but there's no scale indicator. Also, the zoom starts at the top-left corner of the image, not center.

(Zooming over a mouse-click point is the ideal behavior here.) EXIF presentation is ok but not great. I think ArcSoft Photo+ would intelligently cluster key camera & lens settings like exposure time, aperture, focal length etc. Very easy to read. Sequential's exif report is like a blind dump of whatever junk the camera wrote. (example: Exif from my Canon G15 jpgs contains 'Sensing Method One-Chip Color Area'. Seriously, that's useless!!) Another mistake: it uses the file creation date for the 'Image Created' field, not the actual Capture Time. That all said, if this isn't too inflammatory, does anyone care to offer what image viewer they use and why it works for them?

Try PhotoMechanic and see what you think. I started using it 13 years ago when nothing else existed. It was developed for photojournalists and initially was simple but incredibly fast. Over the years lots of features have been added, but you can still run it as simple as you like.

It's also great tool for other tasks, such as ingesting, copying, renaming, rating, sorting, etc. Customer support is excellent. You might balk at the cost, especially if you don't use all the features, but a license lasts forever. I think I've upgraded twice since 2003 and didn't even need to do that. I've never found anything close to Photo Mechanic for easy fast browsing. Sdh wrote: I'm searching for a good photo viewer.

Google search found a thread here from a couple years ago but I thought I'd raise the question again and see if I can get some current recommendations. I want a photo viewer that's simple and quick.

I want to be able to double click a single photo in a folder to launch the viewer, and then jump to next & previous photos via the arrow keys. I don't want to have to do CMD-A to select all files in the folder.

I want a true 1:1 / 100% zoom (where 1 pixel in the image = 1 screen pixel). Quick Look (ie, the Finder) gets you very close. You did not list 'full screen viewing' as a requirement (though you might want it). You don't have to do a select all, you can select one image and hit the spacebar to get going. If the Finder folder is in list view, down-arrow advances to the next image (if the folder is in icon view, you have to 'physically' walk your way through it, ie, right-arrow gets you to the right and down-arrow gets you down).

Press and hold the alt (option) key to get a 1:1 view. If you have a trackpad, you can then pan around within the 100% view with two fingers on the trackpad. With a mouse, you have to press down the (left) mouse button to pan around.

Note, if you want to view things fullscreen (press alt spacebar), using the arrow keys doesn't work anymore or rather you have to select all images first for them to work. However, even without fullscreen mode, Quick Look displays content using about 90% of the screen height which might be good enough for casual viewing. You can also manually extend the Quick Look 'window' and it will keep its size as long as you are 'in' Quick Look.

I'd say things don't get any more lightweight than Quick Look. There are apps that one could call alternative file browsers (I happen to have Lyn installed) where you can have fullscreen mode (though it's a two-step process: a) 'open' image & b) make fullscreen) and arrow navigation without having to first do a select all (or manually extend the 'window' to fullscreen) but then you are limited to navigating your folder structure from within Lyn and not from the Finder which means for example that you are limited to list view and don't have normal Finder sidebar. Advantages are you can also view image metadata, add metadata (though it seems they might only be accessible from within Lyn), though there are also Quick Look plugins that allow you to view some basic metadata (I am not sure however if they, eg, SneekPeek Photo, are still available). I don't need editing capability. I have a huge LR library for that.

I don't want an app that creates it's own database of thumbnails (that's LR again). The reason I don't want to just use LR as a viewer is because it's slow. It's a great library manager but a poor slideshow presenter.

Do you have two different sets of photos (one inside of LR and one that never sees LR)? Or do you export all images out of LR after processing? Otherwise this 'photo viewer' you are looking for won't show any adjustments you made in LR. Preview isn't retina aware, and I find it horrible. I like Lilyview, but on my Mac it seems to have some issue with remaining at 1:1 when I zoom it; it snaps back. Dunno if that's maybe some other utility interfering or what. Take a look at Lyn; it might fit the bill.

But I'm wondering: why not Adobe Bridge since it works well with Lr? It's quite fast on my computer, and really rips along in Review Mode. It does cache previews, but you can use embedded ones, or manipulate settings to increase speed. Lilyview: I found it very buggy. When scrolling through pictures, the image view would dissolve into a distorted, stained-glass-like presentation at random pictures.

Then the next picture would display fine, then 5-10 pics later, stained glass again. Also the Option-0 would sporadically fail to revert to Fitted zoom. Instead, the Option key would activate an over-zoom state beyond 1:1. There are also design aspects I disagree with. For example: CMD-0, -2 & -5 are assigned to various zoom levels (1:1, 200% & 50%), which is great. So then Zoom to Fit Screen so also be CMD-something, not Optn-0. No Filmstrip view.

No way to view EXIF (that I could find). Can't pan within the image via mouse-click dragging when zoomed larger that Screen Fit. (Don't force me to use the track pad-two finger method, which works very poorly for me.) So overall I wouldn't buy Lilyview for a nickel, let alone the $5 they charge for it. Quicklook (spacebar in Finder) I had forgotten about this when I wrote the OP, but I also just assumed it was another variation of the default PReview.

Anyway, I've tried that and noticed all the aspects mentioned above. The dealbreaker for me is that you still have to pre-select all files to be able to scroll (next/previous via arrow keyas) in true fullscreen mode. Also, I think the so-called 1:1 view is actually overzoomed. Lyn: This appears good in concept but it looks buggy to me, at least in the trial I downloaded. “Actual size” is overzoomed. (Im beginning to wonder if I have the wrong notion of what “actual size” should be??) There's a keyboard shortcut to zoom to 'actual size' (CMD-0) but no complementing keyboard command revert to Screen Fit. (seriously??) Zoom In via the “+” key doesn’t work.

It mis-interprets keywords having dashes or spaces. (Splits them into multiple items.) Sort By Exif Date doesn’t work.

It ignores dates and sorts by filename. Can't show EXIF in Fullscreen mode. Cant show the filmstrip in non-fullscreen mode.

It looks like they wanted to design a smart app but did zero testing before releasing, yielding. (context: I’ve been doing software QA for almost 20 years. ) - Adobe Bridge interesting. Does it do a real fullscreen view of images? I couldn’t find any real info about Bridge on Adobe’s website beyond the 1 minute video. Photomechanic yes, I balk at the cost.

I recently spent $150 for a LR6 license key, foolishly thinking I couldn’t reuse my LR4 license that I bought for Windows. So Im not inclined to spend another $150 for something that seems like a LR equivalent. ACDSee another LR replacement??

Darktable is this free?? If I find time I'll do a free trial of some of these 3. I'm pretty heavily invested in LR but I'd consider switching to something else, even at monetary cost, if it had the right combination of editing and cataloging capability plus slideshowing viewing ease and speed. But it looks like Sequential will remain my non-LR viewer of choice. Its flaws are the least severe of what I've tried sofar.

(ArcSoft Photo+ was the perfect viewer, that I can't use anymore. Anyone have an access key they want to share?

- Regarding the question of whether I keep multiple copies of photos in my library (due to the fact than LR Development edits are invisible outside of LR): The answer is yes, sort of. I use LR mainly as an organizer and I don’t edit most of the pictures I take. I love LR’s Develop module and I use it for favorite photos I want to make “perfect” or just improve if they were badly exposed for example. I usually export a copy of the edited version so I can see both the original and edited versions in non-LR slideshows. I like the comparison and thinking “oh yeah that’s way better”; it's quirky, I know. This sort of mimics how I approach photography as well.

95% of the pictures I take are just snapshots. It’s like 1% of the time where I'm photographing (not snapshooting) something and hoping it might be worth printing large-ish and hanging on my wall. Thanks again for the replies and suggestions! Bridge with a spacebar push does a fit-in full screen view. IOW, you see all the image, scaled to fit in the window. It has a list view, and an icon view, and you can arrow-key from image to image without selecting anything. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a way in full screen/spacebar mode to say zoom to 1:1, but maybe I've missed that.

A very cool feature is that what it shows is what Lr hath wrought. So if you cropped and changed an image to BW, the cropped BW is what Bridge shows, even though it's browsing the Finder folder itself. Assuming you write to files in Lr. The other neat thing is Review mode.

It's kinda like coverflow, but you can rate, flag and label images a la Lr and Lr will understand those ratings. It does it by folder. And it will show the presence of other files; it only previews media, but one can open the sidecar XMPs in a text editor, for example, which is handy. And show PDFs.

And take a look at Graphic Converter; it has a very nifty browser. It might not be worth it just for that, but it has some other functions (like conversion) I find very helpful.

But slow for fast previewing, but maybe there are ways to speed it up. Finally, there are the dupe finder/culling type applications, like Photo Sweeper and Snapselect. They aren't really browsers, in that you have to open a folder or something inside Lr's catalog, and let it analyze a bit before getting started, but once that's done they are both really fast, and allow flagging and rating and such for Lr. What's nice though is that they can group duplicate looking images, so it's easy to find brackets, etc.

The time interval is flexible. It's something that I wish Lr incorporated; even PM doesn't do this as well. Probably not your total solution, but a tool that might be useful. At times Snapselect has been free; dunno about now. AndroC wrote: So far nobody has mentioned XnViewMp. Does 1:1, next and previous, starts fast, and quite useful.

Free software. Also available for Linux, and Windows. Not an advertisement - just a tool I use on all three OS's. One of the criteria was to be able to arrow key through big previews. I can arrow around in the grid view in XnViewMP, and go full screen, but not arrow key to the next image in fullscreen.

Did I miss something? BTW, XnViewMP is killer for hierarchical keywords if you use those. Sdh wrote: I'm searching for a good photo viewer. Google search found a thread here from a couple years ago but I thought I'd raise the question again and see if I can get some current recommendations. I want a photo viewer that's simple and quick.

I want to be able to double click a single photo in a folder to launch the viewer, and then jump to next & previous photos via the arrow keys. I don't want to have to do CMD-A to select all files in the folder.

I want a true 1:1 / 100% zoom (where 1 pixel in the image = 1 screen pixel). I don't need editing capability. I have a huge LR library for that. I don't want an app that creates it's own database of thumbnails (that's LR again). The reason I don't want to just use LR as a viewer is because it's slow.

It's a great library manager but a poor slideshow presenter. Any suggestions? Here's what I've tried so far, and my impressions: Preview.app: Have to do CMD-A (or preselect all pictures you want to view). Doesn't have true 1:1 zoom state. (The so called 'actual size' zoom option is far more enlarged than 1:1.) Xee: Workflow felt too much like Preview. I use Xee; I do not see your problems with it, and it is 'fast enough' for me. can open one file, and then use, /.

For prev/next file (guess you could rebind this to arrow keys) - actual size seems 1:1 at least to me (although I almost never bother; fullscreen is what I use it for) (I have LR6 too but it is a dog for some usecases and for files I do not actually even want to insert to my catalog to start with.).