Some tests on Android photo viewers

[davidedric]

Hi folks, starting a new thread, but it does follow on from the earlier one about viewers.

Some thoughts on Android image viewers.

I’ve been playing around on my Samsung Galaxy 10” tablet, with different image viewers. Here are some observations.

I have a basic requirement to be able to display images in a defined order, and readily zoom in for greater detail.

As noted in another post, there does not seem to be an Android app that lets you sort images on the tablet, so I have resorted to sorting on the PC and then renaming in the sorted order. The viewer then has to be able to display images in file name order.

The images in question were shot in RAW on a 16 megapixel Panasonic G5 processed in Lightroom and exported as 80% jpegs. They vary in size between 3 and 6 Mb, more or less.

These viewers vary in speed (i.e. how quickly the thumbnail renders), quality of rendering, and zooming behaviour. Obviously, smaller images render faster than bigger ones. I did spend a very few $’s on them.

My basic file manager is ES File Explorer. This allows various sorting options, and has an image browser built in. If all you need is to view images without zooming, this is as good as any. Unfortunately, zooming does not do any re-sampling, so all you get is a blurry picture.

Album Until recently, this was my default image viewer. I still think it has the best combination of speed and accuracy, which is why I picked it (in fact, I suspect it looks ahead and processes the next image in the file while you are viewing the current one). Unfortunately, so far as I can tell it can only sort in date order, ascending or descending – so no good for this job.

F-Stop Renders well enough and is about average for speed. However, when zooming only the visible area of the screen is resampled, so when you move the zoomed area around the image is constantly resampling, which I find very irritating. Won’t be using again.

Fast Image Terrible rendering – avoid

FishBowl Renders and performs OK, but cannot use gestures to zoom. Could not get to grips with the interface. YMMV

QuickPic The free viewer! Not quite as quick as Album, but acceptable and does everything else I want, so that is the one I think I’m going to be using.

Any other experiences welcome!

Dave

[NorthernFocus]

I must have lucked up. I've been using quickpic on a smaller device. Landed there randomly without the evaluation process. Now you've saved me looking further

[dje]

Dave I haven't looked around for some time but last time I did I settled on Quickpic. I'm fairly happy with it.

Dave

[kateveber]

I'm just going to say the same thing like others that QuickPic is well suited for the image view. I'm quite satisfied with that.