7 Best Image Viewer Software for Windows 10 That Can Replace The Photos App

After 5 years of Windows 10 release, the stock Windows Photos App is still buggy and lags on powerful modern systems. It's not the hardware, but Microsoft has not polished the most important app of Windows 10.
Though the Photos app is gradually improving, there is still a lot to be done in the field of performance. Most of the time the Windows 10 Photos app does not open at all or crashes frequently. Many times it is very slow on startup. Though Windows 10 offers a built-in troubleshooting feature, it does not work some times.

But here is the list of  7 Best Image Viewer Software for Windows 10 That Can Replace the Photos App.

1. Activate Windows Photo Viewer
Meanwhile, you can use the good old 'Windows Photo Viewer' from Windows 7. It is a light, fast, bug-free and building system app even in Windows 10. You just need to enable it through one time registry tweak.
Download this registry tweak to activate or deactivate the 'Windows Photo Viewer' from Windows 7.

If you do not like the old 'Windows Photo Viewer' you can revert back any time with a single click. It will restore the original registry settings.

2. nomacs - Image Lounge

nomacs - Image Lounge is as light as the Windows Photo Viewer. But with many useful features. It can handle all the popular image formats including RAW.

• Thumbnail preview for easy navigation.
• Support keyboard arrows to view the next and previous image without switching to the File Explorer.
• Display EXIF information.
• Frameless window and full-screen view.
• Display overview/histogram/file info.
• Improved anti-aliasing support.
• Easy slideshow viewer. Play/pause with a user-defined time interval.
• Adjustable background-color

• Basic Image Editing Support.
• Crop, Resize and Rotate images.
• Color adjustments like brightness, contrast, and saturation, etc.
• Drag and drop support.
• Delete/rename images.
• Create a mosaic image.
• Set wallpaper (windows only)

nomacs - Image Lounge is the best replacement for your Windows photo viewing needs.
It is also available on Linux and Mac.
👉 Download nomacs - Image Lounge from the homepage

3. IrfanView 

IrfanView is fast and compact. Only 3 MB.

Very reputed image viewer available free for personal use.

If support almost every image format. It includes support for BMP, DIB, JPG, JPEG, PSD, PDF, GIF, TTF, TXT, ANI, CUR, CLP, DDS, CAM, Mac PICT, QTIF, MP4, WAD, WBMP, RAS, SUN, SFF, PPM and many other. [Tip: But I got an error for viewing SVG and PNG files.]

IrfanView also plays video and MP3 audio files. Video formats supported are WAV, AVI, WMA, WMV, MPG, MPEG, MP3, MID, and many others. Support has been extending over the years for video and audio files.

• Imagine a 3MB software can handle Full HD MP4 video file. It plays flawlessly.

IrfanView can create a slideshow video from your images. It is the best feature of any image viewer. You can control image transition, its duration, background music file and more. Just add files for slideshow and you are done.
IrfanView is a complicated image viewer. ESC button exits the app. Double click on image navigate to next image. Strange keyboard shortcuts. If you want a plain simple image viewer, IrfanView is not for you.
👉 Download IrfanView from the homepage

4. XnView MP

Excellent software to view images of any type. Completely free and open source.
Support arrow key navigation. The mouse scroll wheel also navigates the images.

• Basic image editing features like Resize, Rotate, and Crop.
• Lossless Rotate & Crop (jpeg).
• Adjust Brightness, Contrast, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast.
• Modify Colors depth & palette and Apply filters & Effects.

• XnView supports batch image conversion from one format to another or batch resizes of images.
• The file browser feature is to create your image library. So that you can easily navigate to the image.
• It has a tabbed interface so that you can easily open multiple images in the same windows and the navigation is very easy.

The file browser has a tree view to browse your folders and view images in multiple tabs. The file browser window shows you the thumbnail of the image and its EXIF info. You can tag the images for easily group images according to tags.
👉 Download XnView from the homepage

5. ImageGlass

Very light on the system. Opens within a fraction of second. Don't want unwanted editing features? ImageGlass is a plain image viewer with basic image viewing features like keyboard navigation, rotate and flip option. Very simple image viewer that supports all the popular image formats.

What else you need. Its a simple but elegant image viewer. Not an image editor. Very light on system resources and clean interface to view all your photos.

• The title bar shows complete info about the image, like image pixel size, memory, format, number of images in the folder, date and time of the image and much useful information.
• You can rename the image while it is open in ImageGlass. Just press F2 and you can rename. It is a very useful feature.

This is my personal favorite.
👉 Download ImageGlass from the homepage

6. FastStone Image Viewer

FastStone Image Viewer is light, supports all the popular image formats, completely free and robust.
The FastStone Image viewer has a built-in file browser so that you can easily navigate your file system. It has basic image editing features like crop, adding text, adjusting basic image settings.
👉 Download FastStone Image Viewer from the homepage

7 qimgv

Open source, fast, simple image viewer for Windows 10. qimgv is very simple and so very fast image viewer with minimal interface. No any extra toolbar or editing options. If you want very minimal and simple software that do just works flawless, qimgv is best image viewer.
If you didn't like nomacs -image lounge for any reason, qimgv is the second best thing. Though you can do some basic customization for your needs, its very easy to use for everyday image viewer.

👉 Download qimgv from the github homepage

Conclusion:

Microsoft will gradually disable the Windows Photo Viewer and you have to choose the new Windows Photos app now or then. If you are not happy with it, you should opt for third party image viewer that is smooth, fast and reliable.

• The nomacs -Image lounge is really fast and support almost every popular image format. I don't want any editing feature in a image viewer. Just a fast image viewer.
• qimgv is also as good as nomacs.
• Image Glass take too much time to open big images.
• Fast stone, XnView and Irfan view are bloated with unwanted features. I have GIMP for image editing. I just want a plain image viewer.

What you think?