JPEGView

What is JPEGView?

JPEGView is the best free image viewer for Windows. It's lightweight, fast, unintrusive, and highly customizable. Its original version can be downloaded from Sourceforce (sourceforge.net/projects/jpegview/), but it's unmaintained, the last release being from 2018. A more recent fork exists in Github (github.com/sylikc/jpegview).

Notable Features

Unintrusive and Mouse-Based: JPEGView displays a single image in its entire window, without menubar, statusbar, or scrollbars. It provides its main menu through a right click, where a context menu would normally be. Panning is done by clicking and dragging. It can zoom in and out with the scroll wheel. Its only visible GUI is a semi-transparent overlay toolbar that only appears when you cursor approaches the lower part of the window. With it, it's possible to rotate the image, for example.

Intuitive: after an image is open in JPEGView, it can navigate through the other images in the same folder by pressing the left/right arrow keys.

Has Metadata: JPEGView can change display the dimension, size, and other information of the image with a simple keyboard shortcut press.

Customizable: a lot of JPEGView's functionality can be customized, such as how it auto-zooms images, whether the window size changes when you open an image, and most notably, it lets you you toggle interpolation methods from linear to nearest neighbor. Unfortunately, a lot of this customization needs to be done by editing .INI files, without a settings dialog, which is not very beginner friendly.