Photo viewer, organizer... whats the best?

Hands Down, what is the Fastest and Lightest and least of a resourse hog for an Image Viewer/ organizer?
Whats the best out there in your opinion? Im sick of windown picture and fax viewer.
Anyhting open source?

 

Try picasa2. http://picasa.google.com

Or if you really want it to be "light" - try irfanview. http://www.irfanview.com/

 

Picasa is more of an photo organizer than a viewer. Like davron said, irfanview is a photo viewer that does the same things as the picture and fax viewer, but with more advanced tools to work with. It's by no means an alternative to photoshop though...

 

does irfanview organize photos or just let you view them in a simular manner to windows picture and fax viewer?
Im looking at the picasa website now. Looks feature packed, but does it load images fast?

 

I have Photoshop CS2, Adobe Bridge, and Picasa2 installed. I did have IrFanView and FastStone Image Viewer installed, but don't right now.

I actually find just logically creating an organized folder/subfolder structure works the best for me. But if you want to create artificial "Albums" and have the same physical image in more than one logical album, you might want to look at Picasa2. It can also "watch" folders for new images and discover them.

 

oh. looks like we were posting at about the same time. I guess i kindof want something more along the lines of an organizer then... but what are you saying picasa isnt very good for viewing photos? i mean... i can go full screen and such right? Anyhting else out there a nice balance between the 2?

 

Irfanview is very limited when organizing photos. It's worse than using explorer. Trust me.

As for Picasa, it does not load each image. (You can't set Picasa to open when you double click a jpg file) You can go full screen too. I don't know about the balance between the two though. ACDSee costs money, but that's the only thing I can think that would be a balance between the 2.

 

Irfanview.

 

So basically picasa is my only decent option for an organizer?

 

No, but it is free.

 

Picasa is a wonderful program!

 

Picasa is really nice to organize and upload ur photos......I use ACDSee on my XP machine as a viewer....nice program !!

 

If you want to spend money, Photo Album (Corel) is also pretty good, but it really depends exactly what features you are looking for.

I agree with a prior poster, the best photo organizer is a good directory structure.

 

Well on my hard drive, i keep all my photos organized into seperate folders. And i by no means do i want a program that changes the directories i already have set in place myself. I guess i just wanted something that allows me to view all my pictures in a thumbnail view all at once. So i can easily scroll through them and pick out the ones i want to view, then be able to make small enhancments or corrections if needed.

However, now that i am writing this... I never even thought of turning on thumbnail view for my picture folders, it always bugged me in the past... but maybe now thats more of what I want.

Doesnt windows add small files to each folder for thumbnail previews though? how does that affect system performance?

 

Lightroom by Adobe is a good one, and it integrates very nicely with Photoshop CS2 and CS3, and has some decently powerful editing options of its own.
As well as the capability of working with many RAW files from DSLRs.