Image Viewer Usage Tests

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TP109
Posts: 571
Joined: Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:12 pm
Location: Midwestern US

Image Viewer Usage Tests

#1 Post by TP109 »

I needed a lightweight viewer, so I tested a number of the image viewers available from this site for resource usage. Tested using a directory of 30 jpg files (total - 9.33MB), otherwise used a single jpg file of 88kB for those apps that don't have the capability to load an entire directory at once. Didn't document the differences in load capabilities in the results since this is just a quick test for now. Might refine it a bit later.
imageviewers.jpg
imageviewers_bench.jpg
Spreadsheet file uploaded to the link below:
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 9877065671

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Midas
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Location: Sol3

Re: Image Viewer Usage Tests

#2 Post by Midas »

Cool, thanks. 8)

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Userfriendly
Posts: 430
Joined: Tue Nov 27, 2012 11:41 pm

Re: Image Viewer Usage Tests

#3 Post by Userfriendly »

My primary general purpose image viewer these days is HoneyView. Really like it for archived images/comics and animated images. It has a setting in Image Processing where you can adjust the the amount of memory it will use for caching the next image or you can disable caching completely. By default it uses up to 300MB. This is the main reason I like it for comic archives. Store it completely in memory and flip through images fast.

This is becoming a theme for me with my application preferences. I like EmEditor or UltraEdit for the same reasons. Caching in memory/ramdisk for speed boosts. Memory not used is memory wasted I say. Though I do see memory usage still being a problem with budget laptops and tablets that usually only have 1 or 2GB RAM.

I guess these tests would help find which apps hog a lot of memory but are not making efficient usage of it thus still being slow to render images while some can use very little memory but still be blazing fast.

Specular
Posts: 443
Joined: Sun Feb 16, 2014 10:54 pm

Re: Image Viewer Usage Tests

#4 Post by Specular »

My favorite is Pictus. Would be interested to see how it sits in these results as it's visually simple and snappy.

TP109
Posts: 571
Joined: Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:12 pm
Location: Midwestern US

Re: Image Viewer Usage Tests

#5 Post by TP109 »

Pictus runs on Vista+. I am using XP. I noted that on the spreadsheet.

Enternal
Posts: 89
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2014 3:41 pm

Re: Image Viewer Usage Tests

#6 Post by Enternal »

Userfriendly wrote:My primary general purpose image viewer these days is HoneyView. Really like it for archived images/comics and animated images. It has a setting in Image Processing where you can adjust the the amount of memory it will use for caching the next image or you can disable caching completely. By default it uses up to 300MB. This is the main reason I like it for comic archives. Store it completely in memory and flip through images fast.
Yep same here. HoneyView is great for archives images and mangas. In the past, I used FastStone MaxView for the same reason but I had issues with certain mangas with Unicode characters. However, with the recent releases of FastStone MaxView (and Viewer as well) that finally supports Unicode, I'm kind of tempted. However, I rather enjoyed HoneyView's interface. For fast image viewing though in terms of just speed, Pictus is really good and it's something I set up as my secondary image viewer in XYplorer. After that would be FastStone MaxView.

Since I looked at a lot of images, I ended up having so many other alternative image viewers because each of them are either fun to use or have something I like about them. So other than the 3 main ones I listed above, I also have Xlideit Image viewer, JPEGViewer, and IrfanViewer. For large galleries viewing though, I use primarily FastStone Viewer though there are times I use XNView MP. Don't know which one I prefer more.

Eitherway, I must be crazy to have all these image viewing applications right? Haha. It's the same thing for explorer alternatives. I primarily use XYplorer but I have also bought Directory Opus (highly enjoyed using this one), xplorer2 Ultimate (I like it but these days I rarely use it since personally I think Directory Opus and XYplorer are superior as well as the developers for these two are actually responsive to ideas and helpful), MultiCommander, Q-Dir, and FreeCommander.

Yep. It's official. I'm crazy.

TP109
Posts: 571
Joined: Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:12 pm
Location: Midwestern US

Re: Image Viewer Usage Tests

#7 Post by TP109 »

Updated the Image Viewer Usage Tests. Updated versions for the image viewers are highlighted in green on the spreadsheet. The test process was changed slightly to make it more standardized and fair. Because some viewers load only a single image instead of a directory by default, the test conditions were changed so the apps tested would load from a directory containing a single image. If a viewer loads a directory by default, then only that image loads. If the viewer loads a single image by default, then that same image loads. Generally, the results are similar to the previous results with some slight changes. The benchmark numbers are higher overall because a larger test image was used, but since this is a comparison test, the benchmark number isn't significant in itself. Again, for the charts, lower numbers are better.
chart_iv.jpg
bench_iv.jpg

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