I have heard of Adobe Bridge, but I’ve never used it. It is not free is it?
Some free software that I have used is Irfanview
IrfanView is provided as freeware, but only for private, non-commercial use (that means at home).
IrfanView is free for educational use (schools, universities, museums and libraries) and for use in charity or humanitarian organisations.
As far as speed, Irfanview would be hard to beat. It can load a RAW file in less than a second. (NOTE: As far as I know, it actually loads the preview JPEG embedded in the RAW file. You can set it to read the actual RAW file, but then you might as well use Lightroom, as far as speed is concerned.)
Pros:
Can read almost any image/audio/video file under the sun.
Loads RAW previews within a second.
Is very light on system resources. i.e. it doesn’t bog down your computer like Lightroom does.
Cons:
Isn’t free for commercial use. I don’t know how much of a con this really is, as I only use it for previewing my personal photos.
When I delete an image, it won’t scroll to the next image. i.e. I have to hit Del. then hit Enter to confirm, then I have to hit the arrow key to get to the next image.
When I want to check for focus, I normally use my mouse wheel to zoom in, however, the default mouse wheel action in Irfanview is to scroll to the next picture. It’s very annoying when I forget, and it scrolls through half a dozen pictures! To zoom, you must hold the CTRL key, then zoom with your mouse wheel.
Verdict:
If you can’t wait for Windows Photo Viewer to take 5 seconds each to load your RAW files, (not to mention, run the risk of crashing your computer from CPU overload.) then Irfanview is still a much better option, even considering the cons.
Keep tuned for another review of some software I found just this week!
- This reply was modified 54 years, 8 months ago by .