Windows Photo Viewer, a built-in picture viewing program in Windows, is not only very slow to open large pictures, but also very laborious to view large-sized pictures (you need to reach the top with great effort, and then drag and drop pictures with great effort). In order to obtain a faster, more efficient, and better image viewing experience, we often need to use a third-party image viewer.

JPEGView is a free and open-source full-screen image viewer & editor with minimal GUI, originally developed by David Kleiner, and forked and improved by Kevin M (sylikc). Among so many picture viewing tools, JPEGView has always been on the list and has been popular since its first launch. Unfortunately, the original developer has given up maintenance. But fortunately, Kevin M took it over again and brought new features to it.

JPEGView is small, fast and highly configurable, uses SSE2 and up to 4 CPU cores to implement hardware acceleration, provides basic image processing functionality that can be applied real-time during viewing an image (no need to go into additional editing mode), which allows to quickly and interactively adjust common parameters of image such as sharpness, color balance, rotation, perspective, contrast and local under-/overexposure.

JPEGView has an extremely simple interface, which brings users a very simple and convenient way to browse pictures. It simplifies the complexity while ensuring that the basic functions that a picture browser should have are available. It supports slideshow/movie mode to play pictures (very good picture viewing experience), and supports very rich picture formats (including popular JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG, TIFF, JXL, TGA, WDP, HDP, JXR, DNG, and newer formats such as WEBP, HEIF/HEIC, AVIF, etc.). In addition, it also supports direct cropping and copying of pictures to the clipboard or saving them locally, display of EXIF information and image histograms, supports batch renaming/copying, double-click to display image in 100% size, opening the picture to enter full-screen mode by default, and saving all parameters in INI file, etc.

It's the opposite of XnView, JPEGView is all about simplicity and efficiency. When viewing pictures with it, you will find that all its function buttons are well hidden in the interface, but do not interfere with your browsing pictures. At the same time, you can use the left and right keyboard keys to quickly switch between images, up and down keys to rotate images, and mouse wheel to control the zoom of images.

In a word, if you are looking for a lightweight and easy-to-use image browser, then JPEGView can be one of the best alternatives of Windows Photo Viewer and most 3rd-party image viewers (such as ImageGlass, MassiGra, Vieas, HoneyView, etc.). Especially if you often need to browse large pictures in high-definition resolution, then JPEGView may be especially suitable for you.

Key Features

Feature Description
Supported image formats
  • JPEG (including EXIF)
  • BMP (Windows Bitmap)
  • WEBP
  • JPEG XR (Windows XP: WIC must be installed)
  • PNG
  • GIF (including animated GIFs)
  • TIFF
  • TGA
  • Camera RAW (embedded JPEGs)
  • HEIF/HEIC
  • AVIF
  • ....
Fullscreen viewing
  • Image centric - nothing else visible by default
  • Multiple monitor support
  • Window mode also supported (Toggle with Ctrl-W)
Small and fast
  • Executable is only 1 MB
  • C++/MMX/SSE/AVX2 code
  • 32 bit and 64 bit versions
  • Support for multiple CPU cores to speedup processing
  • Minimal dependencies on external libraries
High quality resizing of images
  • Downsampling filter preserves sharpness
  • Bicubic interpolation for upsampling
Interactive image processing and improvement
  • Real time and full screen image processing
  • Contrast, Brightness and Saturation adaptation
  • Unsharp masking
  • Cyan-Red, Magenta-Green, Yellow-Blue color balance
  • Local brightness correction to lighten shadows and darken highlights
  • Automatic color and contrast correction
  • Rotation in 90 deg steps
  • Free image rotation for horizon correction
  • Perspective correction
  • Lossless JPEG transformations
  • Crop image (supporting lossless crop for JPEGs)
  • Landscape picture improvement mode
Viewing and image processing parameters can be saved per image
  • Image file remains untouched
  • Database entries remain valid when image file is moved or renamed
Slide shows and movie playing
  • Plays slide shows given by text file
  • Multiple transition effects for slide shows
  • Plays all images in folder as movie with configurable frame rate. All image processing remains functional while playing.
Batch rename and copy
  • Copies and renames files from digicam to target folders
  • Creates target folders as needed
  • Supports various placeholders for renaming files
Extensible and highly configurable
  • Allows defining user commands
  • Allows opening images with external applications
  • Allows changing all keyboard shortcuts
  • Plenty of configurable items in the INI file

Prompts

  • JPEGView doesn't open pictures as fast as claimed.
  • JPEGView supports preview sidebar, which greatly facilitates viewing of long screenshots.
  • By default, JPEGView displays image in "Modification date". But I prefer to display them in order of file names (Right click image -> Display order -> File name).
  • To save settings, right click an open image, then select "Settings/Admin -> Save current parameters as default values..."

Related Links

Download URLs

License Version Download Size
Original Version
Freeware v1.0.37 Final n/a
Fork Version
Freeware Latest n/a
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