First Impression: a lightweight image viewer (with no visible interface)
First Impression is a free, lightweight image viewing app that is geared towards utilizing as much of the screen’s real estate as possible for image display without cluttering it with the viewer’s own interface. It manages to do so while providing a nice set of functions, but what I really like about this program is that images are displayed on screen as draggable objects (similar to previously mentioned Vjpeg).
A full fledged image viewer for under 8 megs? Yes indeed. It also provides the usual minimum set of image viewing features such as flipping, rotating, zooming in and out, and saving the image as desktop wallpaper.
A couple of quirky things about this one (which I actually like); the first thing is that images are displayed with your desktop and icons as background, rather than a black screen. The second thing is that you can drag images around the screen as you would any normal window. Not useful for any practical purpose I can think of, but somewhat pleasant nonetheless. More notes:
- All functions can be performed by right-clicking the image or through keyboard shorcuts.
- You can scroll with the mouse to view images that are too big to fit on screen, such as panoramic images (unless you choose fit to window, inwhich case the images will be forced to fit).
- Provides a good range of image resizing algorithms to choose from, if that matters to you.
The verdict: do you want a lightweight image viewer that consumes very low resources yet manages to be somewhat cool? You found it! The only thing I might imagine some people might prefer is the option to blacken the background when displaying images rather than display it as hovering over the desktop.
Version tested: 1.02
Compatibility: Windows XP or higher.
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 234K).
thanx
Very nice, and I mean it: I’ve adopted ‘First Impression’. It handles the following formats: bmp,gif,jpg,png,tif,jpeg by default (see Options), it is amazingly fast, and above all, as mentioned by Samer, “is that images are displayed on screen as draggable objects”, and the result, the effect is more than pleasant, it’s really like a “visual shortcut” …
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Thanks, Samer, for this very nice discovery!
I also miss the option to navigate using the scroll wheel and arrow keys.
I think Picasa is much better. Has a nice pic viewer (which also displays on the background, but darkens it), has excellent image editing capabilities, and can also edit movies, make slideshows, collages, etc. Its setup is just 7.5 MB.
[...] A novel feature is that images can be dragged around, similar to previously mentioned Vjpeg. First Impression is freeware, Windows only. First Impression [via Freeware Genius] [...]
[...] A novel feature is that images can be dragged around, similar to previously mentioned Vjpeg. First Impression is freeware, Windows only. First Impression [via Freeware Genius] [...]
[...] A novel feature is that images can be dragged around, similar to previously mentioned Vjpeg. First Impression is freeware, Windows only. First Impression [via Freeware Genius] [...]
[...] Freeware Genius Sitio Web: First Impression Tags: First Impression, fotografia, imagenes, visor Otras [...]
I actually use FastStone MaxView. It’s free for home use, I use the portable version of it, handles quite a number of formats (though not as extensive as Irfanview) and you can customize it to have no interface, i.e. no borders or caption bars or menu. I get withdrawal symptoms if I use any other viewer. Just a simple viewer with some basic image editing features and conversion. Version 2.2 takes up 1.8MB space on my drive, no-install version.
[...] First Impression via {Freewaregenius} [...]
irfan view is way better and is the best freeware image viewer out there
Great little program, with one minor problem: can’t get the “zoom in” and “zoom out” keyboard shorcuts to work! Can anyone help?
I’ve uninstalled it, manually deleted all associated files and folders, and reinstalled it, but nothin goin. (I’m runnin XP sp3)
Has anyone had the same problem? Or know how to fix it?