Haven’t written one of these in a while, but I guess one program I use every day practically and I’m sure other people use a similar program in one form or another is the excellent Xnview.

The website says it’s got the following features:

• Import about 400 graphic file formats
• Export about 50 graphic file formats
• Multipage TIFF, Animated GIF, Animated ICO support
• Resize
• Copy/Cut/Crop
• Adjust brigthness, contrast...
• Modify number of colors
• Apply filters (blur, average, emboss, ...)
• Apply effects (lens, wave, ...)
• Fullscreen mode
• Slide show
• Picture browser
• Batch convert
• Thumbnail create
• Screen capture
• Contact Sheet create
• Multi-page file create (TIFF, DCX, LDF)
• TWAIN support (Windows only)
• Print support (Windows only)
• Drag & Drop support (Windows only)
• 44 languages support (Windows only)

Advantages: What I love about it is that it’s light weight. I want a screen shot of something? Bang it’s done, resized, cropped and saved ready to go within minutes.

It’s my weapon of choice when I’m putting something on Broken Kode. I could do it in Photoshop, but this method is so much faster.

The thing I like the most about this program is the fact that it is solidly made. From the icon to the menu system, everything is laid out in a proper order and is very easy to understand.

It also integrates nicely with itself. So that you’ve got the thumbnail view and an explorer like menu, which when a thumb is clicked it takes you to the image. Close the image and you’re back in the explorer menu. This is in contrast to Ifranview for example which is seperated into two programs.

The icons are extension specific. So a png with have a little png note on it, while a gif will be a different colour, that sort of thing. There is a commercial version of the program

It’s nice that it’s skinnable, scores some major points with me as the default is a bit boring.

Disadvantages: It will view my psd files, although for some reason if they’re CMYK it’s completely kill the colours, but that’s a small price to pay to be honest.

When viewing AutoCAD files however It comes up with a stupid popup message that asks me if I want to buy a plugin. No f"£k off.

Although to be honest I’d have liked it more if it would actually have been open source like firefox. It could easily be one of the best tools on the market for this sort of thing. I’d really like to see an open source alternative that rivals how well built this little application is however I haven’t found one, so I’ll be content with this freeware software.