Windows Photo Viewer is the built-in app for viewing your photos in Windows. Almost all formats of images are supported by Windows Photo Viewer. But in Windows 10, Microsoft has confused its users by providing another photo viewer called Photos, which is not liked by users as they are used to with Windows Photo Viewer.
Windows Photo Viewer is very simple to use viewer. It can show you a single photo, or all photos of a folder in a slide show. You can directly print photos or via online printing service. Send your photos through email or burn them to disc.
If you have upgraded to Windows 10, and do not want to use Photos as the default image viewer, you can either go to the Registry to make Photo Viewer default again (sorry, no easier method) or here I am providing few alternatives of Windows Photo Viewer which are as simple as Windows Photo Viewer. You can use any of below viewer reliably and easily.
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IrfanView
IrfanView is an old photo viewer used by many users reliably and easily. Its developer has made it very useful even for new versions of Operating Systems. You can have many new and practical features. It is a freeware photo viewer.
It is very fast and opens your images quickly and instantly without any delay. It can optimize your photos, resize and rotate images. IrfanView has basic editing tools like cropping, resizing, red-eye removal or rotating of images. Create slides show and print your photos via IrfanView. Batch processing is also supported in it. IrfanView not only supports image formats but also play audio and video formats. It is available in multi languages.
Alternative to Windows Photo Viewer
As like Windows Photo Viewer, IrfanView supports almost all types of image formats. You can scan your images and print directly from this viewer. It supports slide show. And helps you in the basic editing of images.
XnView
XnView is a fast image viewer third party tool that provides you many features as like Windows Photo Viewer provides. You can use it in a portable version also. The image rendering quality is very good and fast as compared to IrfanView, but it’s most of the features are same of IrfanView viewer.
It supports a large number of image formats, more than 500 image formats. The slideshow feature is also available. It even allows you to capture your screen. You can use XnView in more than one language because it is a multilanguage viewer. XnView can be used on Linux and Windows Operating Systems. You can manage and customize your photo library with it.
Alternative to Windows Photo Viewer
XnView supports almost all types of image formats. It supports slide show feature. And you can edit your photos with basic editing tool like cropping, rotating and resizing as like you can do with Windows Photo Viewer.
Nomacs
Nomacs is a free and open source photo viewer with clustered of features and functions. You can use it on almost every Operating System. It supports almost all image formats including RAW and PSD images. Nomacs makes you able to view the metadata, thumbnails, and histogram of your images.
It will fit with your requirement. You can browse zip or MS Offiice files with Nomacs. It helps you in increasing the brightness of your images, contrasts your photos with its adjusting tools.
Alternative to Windows Photo Viewer
As like Windows Photo Viewer, Nomacs supports almost all types of image formats. See your multiple images together in a Slide Show with Nomacs. And you can edit your photos with basic editing tools like cropping, rotating and resizing as like you can do with Widnows Photo Viewer.
FastStone Image Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable and reliable image viewer, image browser, image editor and image converter. It is a freeware and open source tool. FastStone supports a large number of image formats. It has basic editing tools that can help you on cropping, rotating, resizing your images. It also removes the red eye from your images. Drag/Drop and Copy/Move feature is available for users convenience. Versatile screen capturing facility is available in FastStone Image Viewer. Different effects and transitions are provided in this viewer. You can apply multilevel undo or redo with your images.
You can also use it in a portable version.
Alternative to Windows Photo Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer supports almost all types of image formats. See your multiple images together in a Slide Show within it with 150+ musical transition effects. You can edit your photos with basic editing tool like cropping, rotating and resizing as like you can do with Windows Photo Viewer. It also creates efficient image attachments for emailing to friends and family.
Download FastStone Image Viewer from here
Imagine
Imagine is very fast and lightweight photo viewer among all. It is freeware third party image viewer. It supports a large number of image formats. You can view detailed information of your image files. It supports ZIP, RAR, 7Z, ALZ, HV3, CBZ, CBR, and CB7 files. Imagine has multilanguage support.
Both 32bit nad 64-bit versions are available. It helps you to capture your screen, create animations. Batch conversion is also supported. View your images together in a slideshow with Imagine.
Alternative to Windows Photo Viewer
Imagine has support to show images together in a slideshow as like Windows Photo Viewer. A large number of image formats is supported by Imagine. It has basic editing tools for your images.
All of above photo viewers are best and free to use as Windows Photo Viewer alternatives. Pick any of them and use reliably as all are easy and fast in use and allow you to view your images quickly.
17 comments
Deki
Hello, how to start Slideshow?
Nice programm.
Mark Pendragon
Your article is unreadable because of all the share icons blocking off the beginning of every sentance, on the left hand side of the page. Shame, it would have been interesting to read it.
Usman Khurshid
Very sorry to hear that. Which device did you use to open the website? Normally if the device screen is smaller, the sharing icons will automatically disappear.
Kome Cafe Vietnamese Coffee
What do software support slideshow with multi effect?
Ilya
All viewers are some kind of trash. Design didn’t change from 90′. I need viewer which open image as big as possible for image size and as fast as possible. Fullscreen. No borders. No toolbars. No other things which overlapping picture. And no auto-slideshow. But it must read all possible picture formats. Very simple. But I didn’t find nothing like that. It’s sad.
Sorin Nica
I tries faststone and it is super photo browser!
Fast, really free, not selling anything. I search for simple browser and there is a feature I lost with ICDsee when it was free (like ~15 years ago). When double click on a picture open it in full scree and when press esc just exit, when press enter move to browsing mode….. this is as great as simple.
so
Faststone does exactly this … too bad it crash after few months.
Sorin Nica
You are perfectly right. After few months of using it I give up. too much crashes.
Bill
FastStone image viewer, I highly recommend it. No hype, no trying to upsell you anything, just good solid freeware and very good features. Even has cool advanced features like batch renaming. Highly configurable.
joheben
Grr – that I have at all needed to look for this is baffling idiocy on the part of Microsoft. Windows Photo Viewer was EXCELLENT. Not I have NOTHING (not even Photos). The apps that are at all available are total CRAP for opening and viewing big photo files (for example Paint).
Usman Khurshid
Joheben you can also enable Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 10.
Tom
Recently, a new image viewer/editor/convertor was updated to windows app store. It is fastest in loading images I’ve ever used. Here is the link
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/app/9nmjl87dt9jg
It also includes many useful features like, Non-constructive text adding and searching/filtering images based on many factors.
RW Ingersoll
Thank you….Microsoft definitely drooped the ball for those of us who did a clean install of Windows 10. It is absolutely a letdown using “Photos” in Win 10 instead of the very usable “Photos Viewer” in Win 7. I’m going to investigate your photo viewing options above and will choose the one best for my needs.
YahooUser
Many times I want to compare photos back and forth, and the wheel was always an easy way to do this, but Irfan View makes this difficult if you go 1 click to far.
Irfan View is very annoying because if you use the wheel to try to advance to the next photo, when it runs out of photo files, it tries to open whatever else is in the file and then shoots error messages for each move of the wheel.
If there are no other files in the folder, it does the same thing.
It SHOULD just recycle to the photos already viewed, but no it just stops and shoots error messages, then when you close the error messages, you get a black screen and the only solution then is to close the viewer and start over.
Amjad
SkyfallView is another nice alternative… and it’s Free
Usman Khurshid
Couldn’t find it. Can you point me to the correct URL of this software?
grahamnt
I have not tried any of those photo viewers alternatives but a friend recommended to me a PhotoViewerPro that has an amazing viewing and editing features.