I found a lot of great and very creative single image viewers, but for a long time, I struggled to find any that could browse folders of images in a seamless and direct way. So, when I returned to the world of vintage Macs a few years ago, some 20 years after their heyday, one of the first things I went looking for was a multi-image viewer. In the PC world of the time, viewers like LView and ThumbsPlus fully supported the concept of browsing complete folders of files, even if the delay between images was sometimes sleep inducing.
Given the slow speed of image decoding at the time, I suppose that the software authors of the day could not envisage that people would ever want to do such a thing, and so they did not build it in.
There was no way to easily browse through a folder of images, one at a time, progressing from one image to the next one, and then to the next one and so on. There was no “next image” or “previous image” function, except if you asked the viewer to open multiple images at the same time. They displayed the image you clicked on and that was it. What always bedeviled me about Macintosh image viewers was that like JPEGView, almost all of them were single image viewers. Decoding speed WAS important at that time – a moderately sized JPEG image could take 10 seconds or more to decode and display on the 25 MHz Macintoshes of the day. With its easy to use interface and its high speed JPEG decoding, it was a natural choice for most people. The Macintosh world seemed to approach this differently however, with the widely revered single image viewer JPEGView being the uncontested king of the hill.
My first computer was a PC, and Windows image viewers tended to come in two basic flavors, single image viewers such as LView or IrfanView and multi-image thumbnail-based catalogers and viewers, such as ThumbsPlus and QPict. Naturally when I got my first personal computer in 1993, the first thing I did was scour the internet (not such a difficult job in those days – the internet was a MUCH smaller place) for a great image viewer/editor. All of my adult life, photography, cameras and digital image processing have been passions of mine. My father gave me a 35mm SLR when I was 13, and I have never looked back. I have always been fascinated with beautiful images.
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