I've been looking for the fastest image viewer for years now. I usually need to sort through a batch of hundreds, sometimes even thousands of photos in a hurry and so I need the fastest tools out there. upgrading the CPU is only half the equasion, the other half being having the fastest software.
I started out with QPEG (Quick-JPEG) in DOS back during the 486 days. then moved to SuperJPEG on Celeron, Pentium II and Duron. unfortunately development on that was stopped and it fell behind. for my previous Athlon 1700+ I tried out Compupic Pro 6.23, IrfanView 3.85, Thumbs Plus Pro 7 and ACDsee 7.0, and decided on ACDSee 7.0 as the fastest of the bunch. but now that I moved to Sempron 3000+, I thought I'd give a couple of the latest offerings a try to find the fastest browser for skimming through images.
FastStone Viewer 2.12beta - very nice full-screen features, gliding menus everywhere, skinnable interface, handy commands and tools, looks very neat overall. one problem though - for skimming through images in full screen, it is unacceptably SLOW (I used 8Mpix 1MB-2MB JPEGs for testing)! even on a Sempron 3000+ it can't keep up with me. if I stop and look at one picture, it does prerender the next one, so that when I skip to the next one, it displays it immediately. but if I keep moving forward, it lags and falls behind quite terribly. I may even be pressing the tenth "next" key, while the program still renders the third picture on the screen and when I stop pressing "next" keys, it slowly works its way up to the tenth picture, rendering each picture from inbetween way too slow. all in all, terrible lag and quite unacceptable.
Picasa2 (from Google) build 1884 - this program blew me away with easy features and beautiful looks! sliding and gliding menus, fade-ins and fade-outs, beautifully designed interface, easy cataloguing of pictures, handy one-button fixes for retouching pics or applying special effects, beautiful slide-shows, writing gift CDs, a dazzling picture time-line feature and more. granted, none of the options are very customizable so some experts may frown, but the features that are there look and act BEAUTIFUL, and pretty much cover the needs of most non-experts. I witnessed first-hand, how the automatic cataloguing of pictures from all over the computer was like a gift from heaven to a girl, who had thousands of pictures in dozens of folders on various drives, so that she no longer knew, what was what and were - Picasa2 gathered up all her pictures into a timeline and showed them to her in a super-slick attractive interface.
about the speed though - it is moderately speedy and it does prerender the next image, but it can fall behind if skimming through pictures fast and it doesn't prerender pictures if you go backwards, so that makes things quite slow overall.
ACDsee 7.0 (build 102) - on my Athlon 1700+, it used to lag and fall behind if I went through the pictures a bit too fast, but now... it is just AMAZING fast! skipping forward or backward through 2MB JPEG pictures in full screen is LIGHTNING fast, practically instantaneous. it doesn't seem to matter how fast I go, through how many pictures I skim or which way I move, ACDSEE prerenders in both directions and keeps up with me without even breaking a sweat (unlike the two other current favourites I tried). granted, this time I didn't try Thumbs Plus, IrfanView or CompuPic Pro, but the last time I tried them they ALREADY lost big to ACDsee, so I can't imagine it being much different this time around.
long story short - I challenge anyone to find a faster full screen JPEG image viewer (for skimming through full-screen pics in a hurry) than ACDsee 7.0. I certainly couldn't.
PS I have no affiliation with ACDsee or whoever makes that software.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
my amateur nightclub photo gallery: http://antonipildid.net
I started out with QPEG (Quick-JPEG) in DOS back during the 486 days. then moved to SuperJPEG on Celeron, Pentium II and Duron. unfortunately development on that was stopped and it fell behind. for my previous Athlon 1700+ I tried out Compupic Pro 6.23, IrfanView 3.85, Thumbs Plus Pro 7 and ACDsee 7.0, and decided on ACDSee 7.0 as the fastest of the bunch. but now that I moved to Sempron 3000+, I thought I'd give a couple of the latest offerings a try to find the fastest browser for skimming through images.
FastStone Viewer 2.12beta - very nice full-screen features, gliding menus everywhere, skinnable interface, handy commands and tools, looks very neat overall. one problem though - for skimming through images in full screen, it is unacceptably SLOW (I used 8Mpix 1MB-2MB JPEGs for testing)! even on a Sempron 3000+ it can't keep up with me. if I stop and look at one picture, it does prerender the next one, so that when I skip to the next one, it displays it immediately. but if I keep moving forward, it lags and falls behind quite terribly. I may even be pressing the tenth "next" key, while the program still renders the third picture on the screen and when I stop pressing "next" keys, it slowly works its way up to the tenth picture, rendering each picture from inbetween way too slow. all in all, terrible lag and quite unacceptable.
Picasa2 (from Google) build 1884 - this program blew me away with easy features and beautiful looks! sliding and gliding menus, fade-ins and fade-outs, beautifully designed interface, easy cataloguing of pictures, handy one-button fixes for retouching pics or applying special effects, beautiful slide-shows, writing gift CDs, a dazzling picture time-line feature and more. granted, none of the options are very customizable so some experts may frown, but the features that are there look and act BEAUTIFUL, and pretty much cover the needs of most non-experts. I witnessed first-hand, how the automatic cataloguing of pictures from all over the computer was like a gift from heaven to a girl, who had thousands of pictures in dozens of folders on various drives, so that she no longer knew, what was what and were - Picasa2 gathered up all her pictures into a timeline and showed them to her in a super-slick attractive interface.
about the speed though - it is moderately speedy and it does prerender the next image, but it can fall behind if skimming through pictures fast and it doesn't prerender pictures if you go backwards, so that makes things quite slow overall.
ACDsee 7.0 (build 102) - on my Athlon 1700+, it used to lag and fall behind if I went through the pictures a bit too fast, but now... it is just AMAZING fast! skipping forward or backward through 2MB JPEG pictures in full screen is LIGHTNING fast, practically instantaneous. it doesn't seem to matter how fast I go, through how many pictures I skim or which way I move, ACDSEE prerenders in both directions and keeps up with me without even breaking a sweat (unlike the two other current favourites I tried). granted, this time I didn't try Thumbs Plus, IrfanView or CompuPic Pro, but the last time I tried them they ALREADY lost big to ACDsee, so I can't imagine it being much different this time around.
long story short - I challenge anyone to find a faster full screen JPEG image viewer (for skimming through full-screen pics in a hurry) than ACDsee 7.0. I certainly couldn't.
PS I have no affiliation with ACDsee or whoever makes that software.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
my amateur nightclub photo gallery: http://antonipildid.net
