On my old computer I has a copy of Adobe starter edition to view my pics on this is no longer available, are there any other viewers STW could suggest preferably free

Cheers Mat

Faststone is very good and free (assume you're on Windows). Get it here.

Picasa 3.

What sort of features do you need?

Eveything from XP onwards has basic photo viewing built-in (e.g. thumbnails and slideshow).

If you need some cataloguing then Picasa will sort them by date, people etc

Irfanview is nice, if you don't need a lot of handholding.

( and it's free )

Picasa all the way

I use fastone maxview all the time – it can display full screen without any clutter, delete without needing confirmation and jump straight into your editor on a keypress. Recommended.

picasa is excellent and has a very convenient facility for uploading to webspace for sharing.

Also depends on the camera and image format.

I tend to pick through my images using Nikon ViewNX as it can display RAW/NEF files and rate them, delete them or open them into CaptureNX as required.

As far as I know it is the only image viewer that can do this properly for Nikon NEF files.

As far as I know it is the only image viewer that can do this properly for Nikon NEF files.

no, MaxView does this too!

Picasa.

no, MaxView does this too!

Ooh.. might take a look at it then. I was under the impression that Nikon encrypted certain information in the NEFs (like White Balance, Camera Settings etc) so that only they could display "accurate" renders of the image (which is why Lightroom etc get it "wrong").

Does MaxView allow you to assign a rating to each image?

I was under the impression that Nikon encrypted certain information in the NEFs (like White Balance, Camera Settings etc) so that only they could display "accurate" renders of the image (which is why Lightroom etc get it "wrong").

it may be encrypted but it isn't secret 🙂

Does MaxView allow you to assign a rating to each image?

no, it's a viewer. It does have some simple editing tools but I never use them. It's a bit like bike multi-tools, I prefer that each tool do one job properly rather than trying to cover everything 🙂

It's a bit like bike multi-tools, I prefer that each tool do one job properly rather than trying to cover everything

Agreed. I use CaptureNX for all my edits, but I like to use a viewer that can be used as a "light table" to perform the initial cull of my images.

I tend to do a full-screen slideshow and rate images 1 to 5 as I go. Then I only bother post-processing and showing folk the 1 or 2 rated images. 3s and 4s I might use. The 5s get deleted completely.

ViewNX is pretty good for all this, but it's a little slow.

Photomechanic is good but not free, you can get a free trial for a month tho, go to camerabits.

By the way, if you work with RAW images (like Nikon NEF/NRW, Canon CRW/CR2 etc) then you might be interested in FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack (which I just stumbled on via this blog).

It allows these RAW files to be displayed in Windows Explorer, Window Photo Gallery, Picture Viewer on XP, Vista and 7 (32-bit and 64-bit).

Picasa

cheers Graham that looks excellent!

Photomechanic is good but not free.

Indeed – it is f***ing expensive, for what it is!! $150 – ridiculous!!

Picasa all the way

+1

cheers Graham that looks excellent!

Can't vouch for it cos I literally found it just now while looking for a review of that fastone viewer. 🙂
but yeah it does look really useful.