The problem with the Photos application is not in its functionalities and features, it is in its performance. It is characterized by being quite slow and consuming a lot of resources. It is for this reason that many users opt for free, easy-to-use and, above all, more efficient alternatives.
XnView
Possibly, we are talking not about the king of image viewing applications, but about the God. It is the most common, used and recommended. It is characterized by being a very light and fast application, offering a great user experience. Besides, XnView offers compatibility with more than 500 types of multimedia files, supporting TIFFGIF, WEBD or PSD, in addition to the RAW format among many others.
It integrates a simple, lightweight editor that allows you to make color adjustments to images, crop them, edit metadata, redesign them, resize them, add a watermark and many other functions. It also has a screenshot system, making it truly complete and versatile. And as it could not be otherwise, it allows you to perform batch actions on the images.
Nomacs
The first option and the one we like the most is Nomacs. It is free software, Open Source and also, quite fast. It supports all types of formats, even some as specific as RAW and PSD. It allows you to add different extensions or plugins that allow you to obtain more information, such as histograms or metadata.
Although this application is intended for viewing images, it allows you to perform a large subset of tasks. Among others, it allows us to cut, copy, rotate, resize or perform batch actions on images. Perhaps the most interesting option is to compare two images to find differences between them. This function is not common at all.
Apowersoft Photo Viewer
This is the application that most closely resembles Windows Photos, but adds more features and options. The most interesting thing about Apowersoft Photo Viewer is the possibility of managing “normal” files such as BMP and TIFF, as well as professional files such as RAW, psd and CDR, as well as the rest of the usual formats. It also includes a batch image processing function.
Something very interesting about this application is the possibility of taking screenshots, viewing images in full screen or fairly basic image editing. As a curiosity, this tool has the ability to open files in Pdf format. It has very low resource consumption, so the load on the processor will be really minimal.
FastStone
Despite its more typical website from the early 2000s, we have quite complete software. FastStone offers us a photo viewer with added features. It is also characterized by being very well optimized, being very fast and also being quite light, taking up little space on the hard drive.
It has a simple and intuitive interface that integrates certain simple image editing functions, nothing fancy. It allows us to make color adjustments, make retouches, view folders and view image metadata. It offers support for most image formats, including RAW.
IrfanView
As in previous cases, we have a simple application that is very complete and fast. IrfanView It is characterized not only by previewing images, it also allows you to watch video, although in some cases some small plugins will be necessary. Like the rest, it allows you to make adjustments to an image or apply adjustments to a group of them.
Among other functions, it has the option to crop, resize and rotate images. We can also make manual or automatic brightness, tint and even gamma level adjustments to our images. These adjustments can be made individually or in batch actions.
BrandiView
We can talk about minimalist software, not only because BrandiView It offers the functions in a simplified way, but adds the most common features, without unnecessary additional elements. It supports a large number of image formats, but also has a EXIF reader and allows you to make simple photo edits.
Due to its simplicity, it is quite fast and efficient software. The truth is that it is such an optimized program that the change between images is almost instantaneous. Regarding the functions, it allows image rotation, conversion and resizing, as well as other similar basic features.