IrfanView

It opens instantly. It shows just the image by default (no toolbars, scroll bars, menu bars, or status bars). I can disable linear interpolation with F3 and show width/height of an image with F2. It zooms with the scroll wheel, pans by dragging, and it lets me go to the next, previous, first, and last image of a directory instantly, and doing that won't resize the window.

I suppose the key difference is that some people want just a read-only image viewer that traverses a directory, while others want a photo viewer, or image metadata editor, or photo management system. I haven't used Windows' default image viewer in ages, but I recall when I used it, rotating an image actually rotated the image, as in it changed the orientation header of JPEG files and rewrote the files. This is why I have trust issues. If even image viewers can't just view the image, how can I possibly trust the software that drives cars, flies planes, or does the banking?

> I suppose the key difference is

Not really the difference in context of IrfanView which is also just an image viewer.

I tried JpegView, but it’s lacking several features I use in IV, and stuff I commonly do in IV is harder to do, so for me IV is a clear and easy winner. Performance is a little better, but not in a way I’d actually care about (mainly superfast skipping through images is slightly faster)

Could you tell me which features do you use in IrfanView that JpegView lacks?

Just from memory as I uninstalled it already:

* Settings in one place, that way I could have probably easily found out how to remove the annoying zoom-features.

* Batch conversion

* Slideshow: Add files/folders, not just a textfile or folder

* Slideshow: More options in general, e.g. random or unique random.

Thanks. I never use the slideshow features so I guess I didn't notice.

I do think it's odd to expect an image viewer to be able to do batch conversion, though. That's what I meant by a read-only image viewer.

It does support batch rename, though. And generally I want to resize images while looking at them, and not go elsewhere for that. But only when I want it to, no automation.