What is a picture viewer?

These days most computer operating systems come with viewers built in. To look at your pictures, all you have to do is double-click on them and the built-in viewer is launched. The big advantage of built-in picture viewers is that they are free. Unfortunately, they tend to be primitive.

Windows Picture and FAX Viewer

Window XP's viewer has some nice features for free software. It lets you do things like scroll to the next and previous picture, zoom in and out, delete the image and print it.

The buttons across the bottom of the viewer window are:

Next and Previous

While the Next and Previous buttons make this viewer easier to use than most built-in viewers, you still can't view a page of thumbnails so that you can jump ahead to only the images that interest you.

Best Fit, Actual Size & Slide Show

When you first open an image, it is sized to "best fit" -- the size that fits in the window. To zoom down to 100%, click on the "Actual Size" button and to get back to Best Fit, use the "Best Fit" button.

The third button in this set starts a slide show. It will show every image in the folder, one after the other. This is a fast way to skim through your images. When you see one you particularly like, get out of the slide show as follows:

• Move the mouse - this brings up a control window in the upper right-hand corner of the screen
• Click on the button with a Red X

Zoom in and out

The next buttons will zoom in and out of the image

Rotate buttons

These buttons let you rotate your images, but you shouldn't use that feature because it will save a copy over your original and that will lead to a degradation in quality. (Most pictures viewers that rotate don't do this, by the way. There is a way to rotate JPEGs without resaving them and most viewers use that way instead.)

Delete, Print, Save a Copy, Edit

The next set of buttons let you delete the image, print it, save a copy somewhere else and launch an editor so you can edit the image. Depending on how you've set up your computer, the Edit button may launch a useful program or it may launch something stupid like a text editor. If your Edit button doesn't do anything useful, you can change this by .....

If that sounds too complicated, don't worry. If you have a picture editor, it probably has a built-in browser so you won't be using Window's Picture and FAX Viewer anyway. Just skip to the section on Picture Editors and don't worry about it.

Mac's Preview

Preview is not as sophisticated as Window's because all it does is show you the image. There are no rotation tools, no slide show feature, etc. You can zoom in and out, but that's about it. Unfortunately, you can't move between images with it either, making it even harder to browse your pictures looking for the best ones.

However, Mac users have a free program called iPhoto that not only lets you view your images, it also lets you edit them. So if you have a Mac, skip trying to view your images with Preview and go right to the section on Picture Editors.

That didn't work!

If you double-click on your pictures and nothing happens, that means one of two things. Either you don't have a built-in viewer that understands JPEG format or you have more than one program that can read the file and your operating system is confused about which one to select. If it's confused, you will see a list of possible programs to pick from. If you recognize a program that you know views or edits photos, pick that one. If you don't see anything that looks like a picture viewer or editor, select a web browser from the list. (These lists almost always include Internet Explorer.)

Using a browser to view pictures

If you have an older computer running an older operating system, it might not come with a Picture Viewer at all. In that case, you can use your web browser because it knows how to view files in the JPEG format. However, you will have to open each file manually (using the "Open File" command) and that can be time-consuming.

Buying a picture viewer

There is software you can buy or download from the web that is easier to view pictures with, but if you are going to get another piece of software, you should seriously consider buying a picture editor. Most picture editors have a picture viewer built into them with lots of feature. Plus, they let you prepare your images for the web or printing. You may already own a picture editor, perhaps one that came free with your printer or digital camera.

The next topic explains what a picture editor is.