When you least expect it and when you're not looking for it.... That's when decent software just seems to pop out of nowhere. Can't tell you how many times I had searched for software in the past to do simple image viewing. Today I found two programs because I decided to look for something to solve an immediate problem - viewing IFF-ILBM images. Go figure.

Now, granted, some people will say "why do you need a mouse-driven image viewer? You can just cat the image files in a terminal window." Well, if you're someone out of the Matrix movies, that will probably work well for you. For everyone else, something better than Apple's own Preview will be much more satisfying.

The first is Xee http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/29046

The program has a forum dedicated to it, but not really an official web page. It's free. It's sort of like older versions of ACDSee. Just a fairly vanilla viewer with a couple of manipulation features like rotation. Supports many file formats and allows you to easily navigate an entire folder full of images (cursor keys or arrows in the toolbar). It doesn't have a browser like ACDSee 1.3 used to have.

The next program, Picture Arena, is a little fuller featured and has many of the same capabilities of iPhoto. However it seems much easier to just view images than iPhoto. it can use iPhoto collections/rolls, but you can also just view images straight from your filesystem without adding anything to any kind of collection or database. Has a browser with multiple thumbnail and list views. Also much easier to simply view rather than being forced into an Edit mode like iPhoto (which can be dangerous and lead to messing up an image). Supports batch renaming and processing features with stacked effects too.

This one is commercial at €25: http://www.picturearena.com/index.php?mode=start&sid=1956790Ge0968f52a5cfbcd5

Bruno