XnView

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XnView

Screenshot of XnView showing a .png image with transparency.
Developed by	Pierre-emmanuel Gougelet
Latest release	Windows: 1.93.6 / May 1, 2008 (2008-05-01); 44 days ago Linux: 1.70 / September 7, 2005 (2005-09-07); 1011 days ago PocketPC: 1.40 / May 28, 2007 (2007-05-28); 383 days ago Smartphone: 1.10 / September 10, 2007 (2007-09-10); 278 days ago
OS	Microsoft Windows and Unix-like
Available in	44 languages (Windows only)^[1]
Genre	Image viewer
License	Freeware
Website	www.xnview.com

XnView on ubuntu (with wine)

XnView is a cross-platform image viewer used for viewing, converting, organising and editing graphic & video files. It is free of charge for private non-commercial, educational use and non-profit organisations. Since it contains plenty of functions found in paid image viewers and supports many image file formats which even ACDSee, another very powerful image organizer, does not support, it is quite popular among Internet users.

1 Features
2 Windows Mobile version
3 Problems
4 Future plans
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Features

XnView is highly customisable and multi-lingual, supporting 44 languages in the Windows version.^[1] The language can be changed via the options menu. The toolbar buttons can be modified to a certain extent, or be replaced by altering skins.

Also, XnView has been able to support more and more file formats (mainly image file formats). It can read more than 400 image file formats, some audio and video file formats, and write 50 image file formats.^[1] XnView also supports ICC profiles in JPEG, PNG and TIFF files.

XnView can show IPTC, Exif and XMP metadata, and write IPTC metadata (but cannot do batch writing of IPTC metadata, a feature that some XnView users have been longing for). A further limitation is that it currently does not allow to sort thumbnails within a folder by a user-defined order.^[2]

XnView can search files that have the same filename or data, and can search for similar graphics as well.

In addition, the display of the histogram of a picture is possible (IrfanView does not have this function). And within a few mouse clicks, scripts can be created to convert, manipulate and rename a batch of images in one go.

Several image editing tools are included, for instance color and size manipulation, several filters and effects (full version even includes Harry's Filters 3.0). Lossless (without new encoding) turning, flipping and cropping of JPEG files is supported. Creation of advanced slideshows is possible as well. Furthermore, it can upload images to an FTP site or Imageshack, burn images to a CD or DVD (Nero Burning ROM required) with a few clicks (full version only).

XnView is accompanied by NConvert, a command line image conversion tool.

[edit] Windows Mobile version

XnView exists now for PocketPC and Smartphone with Windows Mobile 5 & 6, Pocket PC 2002-2005.

[edit] Problems

The Linux version doesn't get updated as often as the Windows version, so it's many versions behind the current Windows version. Many Linux users have complained about this in the official XnView Forum. The good news is that the Linux version of XnView will be updated in early 2008. Beta versions are soon to be released for public testing. The new version will be designed around the Qt4 toolkit and (finally) updated feature-wise to be on par with the Windows version.
XnView does not support Unicode, however the author promises that in v2.0 Unicode will be supported.^[3]

[edit] Future plans

A version for the Macintosh is in the works and planned for release in early 2008. It will probably be released at the same time with the Linux and Windows versions. All three versions will share much in common code-wise, so development will move faster, and builds for all OSes will be released in sync.