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).
