For years, I have been using ACDSee image viewer. For quite some time, it was an intuitive and fast image viewer. But now that the computers are so much faster than before, viewing images should be quicker than ever. Yet, ACDSee feels rather slow.
So, therefore my question. What image viewer do you use because it is really fast.
It’s a plus if they support some sort of cropping/resizing etc, but not a must-have.
Irfanview helped cut down my memory footprint alot. And I look at images that are greater than 4K in size.
It’s also free. 
XnView MP is probably a better choice, imo. It’s also 100% free (for non-commercial use) and 64-bit, but is also vastly more modern than Irfanview. Additionally, XnView gets updated more often.
I currently use ImageGlass, I really like it. I used xnview, acdsee, irfan in the past I think this one is the fastest with the most modern interface, supports all files I need such as tga, tif, psd, exr etc. Free too
Thank you all for your tips!
I don’t mind free software, but could it really be that there are no commercial alternatives?
As Blender has taught us, it’s probably not a great idea to equate price with quality.
While it’s true that commercial apps benefit from dedicated, salaried developers, there are a LOT of commercial apps that stink. Similarly, there’s no hard and fast rule that states that free software can’t be amazing. If anything, a lot of free apps tend to be passion projects. As such, they sometimes innovate in ways that commercial developers feel is too risky or not profitable.
Free apps & hobby projects can vanish a bit easier than commercial ones from established developers, but (again) nothing is set in stone with how this stuff works. It’s best to just do your research.
It should probably also be noted that, afaik, Adobe Bridge is also free. It lacks the deeper editing features of Lightroom, but is still excellent for cataloging and export.
Well, let me ask you this: What feature could you justify paying for versus using one of the many free alternatives?
My gripe with irfanview has always been its weak handling of alphas. It’s not clear when scrolling through images which ones have alphas, transparent .pngs display the same as .jpgs. I’d prefer a standard checkerboard there to indicate the alpha channel. Copying and pasting could support alphas also, the only two real choices when pasting are replacing or overlaying the existing image. The author even once said alphas weren’t supported for that very reason, that he saw no obvious way to implement it within the context of the current menu options. That said, I still use irfanview daily for the things it does do well.
I totally agree that free software might prove more intuitive sometimes. Blender was mentioned as an example.
So when I asked for paid alternatives, it was for no reason looking for any particular feature that I knew was missing in those suggestions mentioned. I simply didn’t want to miss out on any commercial option, just for the reason that it is a paid software.
I bought ACDSee a couple of years back, and back then it had what I needed; features, stability and speed. Today, ACDSee is sluggish, to say the least. I must admit that I haven’t tried out their new versions yet, so I can’t say if they fixed issues that I experience in my old version.
I have downloaded all the suggested image viewers, plus some not mentioned. Will download the trial of ACDsee (I don’t know of any other commercial, if anyone knows, please let me know). I would also like to point out that I bought ACDSee as part of a bundle, so I either got it for free or very cheap. I wouldn’t spend too much on commercial image viewers. For image viewing, I find ACDSee rather expensive today, and too bad they don’t offer pure image viewers anymore. Instead, they seem to focus on sort of a Photoshop-alternative.