Viewer
A drop-in replacement for Windows Photo Viewer
Light & dark backgrounds during normal operation |
It's easy to set as your default image handler for many common formats |
What if Windows Photo Viewer wasn't so broken?
That's what I wondered, so I tasked myself with writing a replacement.
WPV has a number of issues:
- It sometimes refuses to load an image, complaining about being 'out of memory'
- It lacks support for modern formats, such as HEIF
- It lacks support for ancient formats, such as animated GIF
- Panning around large images causes stutters and screen tearing due to software rendering
The priority for me with Viewer was always keeping resource requirements down, which was why I chose C/C++ for the project. For me, there's a huge amount of satisfaction in refining a design to make it efficient in terms of both computation and memory use. As it is, the program at idle requires ~50 to 60 MB of memory plus some factor (depending on compression) of image filesize in VRAM. Viewer uses SDL's hardware rendering to draw images with incredible speed - empirically, I can pan and zoom an ~80 MB, 28 megapixel image at 144hz with no stutters or tearing and without exceeding 7 to 8% CPU usage.
Format support covers 2 areas: some common, default formats that come for free with SDL_image, and formats that WPV explicitly doesn't support. The full list is as follows:
- JPG
- PNG
- BMP
- TIFF
- TGA
- GIF (including animated)
- HEIC/HEIF
I would like to extend this list further, starting with RAW support, but formats start becoming less common and more complex beyond the 7 I already support. This may be a project for the more distant future.