@ruanViewer - Picture Viewer replacement for Windows Photo Viewer.

Squall-Leonhart · July 31st, 2009

This is a suggestions and idea's (and potentially beta release) thread for an App i suggested to @Ruantec

I've noted on various forums, that users are less then enthusiastic about Windows Photo Viewer on Vista/7, and that others consider it Bloated / Stunted and not to be nearly anywhere near as fast as the XP Picture and Fax Viewer.

So I put it forward to @Ruantec, and asked him if he would be interested in making such an app.

Well, this thread is to say that Yes he is, interested, and he (and myself) are interested in knowing what other people would like in the app

.

Some idea's so far,

Cooliris style thumbnail viewer, done right it will obviously be better then cooliris heh.
Selecting next/previous picture using the left and right directional buttons.
Set as Desktop background (without the pathetic jpg compression, noted to be in photo viewer by Strike)
The same, or similar right click menu that exists when you click an image in picture and fax viewer.
APNG and Animated Gif support
Red eye removal.
Resizer tool, with quality slider to adjust save size.

More idea's are welcome

Edit.
Picture and Fax viewer has a Zoom filter that prevents images from jagging up as you zoom in, while photoviewer does not.
Which behavior is preffered. Also if possible does anyone know of any low performance costing HQ filters that can improve the display of the zoomed image?
Maybe we can use the same zoom filter as firefox's? it seems to be relatively good quality.

__________________

VBA-M | Xtemu | NGOHQ | Post Impact Productions | TNHW | XBCD 0.2.6 | Satanic666's Emulator Compiles
Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct
Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!.
If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help.
Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

Last edited by Squall-Leonhart; July 31st, 2009 at 12:32..

strike105x · July 31st, 2009

Verry nice news XD.
Now for something useful in this post of mine: Well imho except for adding to what you said:
1 a rotate clockwise/counter clockwise option;
2 maybe tweaking the the set as background option to have the following options: Center, Tile, Stretched, Fit (where the image fits the screen without loosing any aspect ratio), and maybe fill (same as fit image does not loose aspect ratio but it fills the whole screen, i for one can do without but this app its not addressed to me in particular :P).
3. And lets not forget about slideshow which should be like the fax viewer one except also having options like (center, stretched, fit and maybe fill);
Anything more (like some extra editing options for example) would be bloat imo and can be done better in a app made for editing probably, like gimp for example, the thing about fax viewer which we all liked was its simplicity so that's probably the goal for this to.

__________________

|Strike's Deviantart|Anime List|Important Notice|

Squall-Leonhart · July 31st, 2009

i didn't think i needed to mention the rotate functions as its a stock setting of picture and fax viewer

__________________

VBA-M | Xtemu | NGOHQ | Post Impact Productions | TNHW | XBCD 0.2.6 | Satanic666's Emulator Compiles
Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct
Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!.
If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help.
Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

**Hard core Rikki** · July 31st, 2009

- The DEVIL image library or ImageMagick could be used as a start base.
It also supports many of the such functionalties people expect from an image viewer. Its LesserGPL, so possible to include with closed-source apps.
ImageMagick is more Imageviewer material, also since it supports more formats and features out of the box (its BSD too), and can allow for basic image-editing capabilities.

- A thumbnail collecting database wouldnt be bad, along with maintainance operations, like purging dead entries, reoptimizing, and advance thumbnail generating (like generating a folder's thumbnails in advance).

- Some hardware-accelerated display (but color-accurate operations like zooming).

- 3 thumbs up for cache-ahead and cached/viewed pics kept in memory for faster sequential display. Some image viewers suck specifically for absence/medicrity of this one.

- skipping the integrated functions DEVIL and ImageMagick can already handle out of the box, like HDR support, format conversion, multithread/core parallelization, integrated and manually colorspace support and manually set ones for display in app, RAW (the windows7 one does not support RAWs, so this one's likely to be one of imageviewers most interesting points of differentiation from the win7 app)...

- some quickupload strings for imageshack, flickr, photobucket, email and the likes maybe.

- thumbnail preview generating if rightclicking on pic in Explorer (as desktop integration, desirably opt-in just to be safe).

I was thinking of suggesting the same in the past, funnily enough (along with other small apps, possibly for an aruantec 'collection'. One single apps cant be fit with everything, and separation makes for an interesting portfolio).

__________________

Last edited by Hard core Rikki; July 31st, 2009 at 14:12..

Squall-Leonhart · July 31st, 2009

xD, i've wanted to for ages, but i never knew the right person to ask

__________________

VBA-M | Xtemu | NGOHQ | Post Impact Productions | TNHW | XBCD 0.2.6 | Satanic666's Emulator Compiles
Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct
Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!.
If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help.
Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

Silenus · July 31st, 2009

Great ideas guys.

Hope something really good comes out of this.

__________________

--ASUS G50VT-X1 - P8400 2.5GHZ - Geforce 9800GS 512MB - HDD 320GB - 4GB DDR2 800MHZ - WINDOWS 7 64 BIT - ZALMAN NC2000--

...Mis sueños son mentiras que algun día dejarán de serlo...

**Hard core Rikki** · July 31st, 2009

Quote:

Picture and Fax viewer has a Zoom filter that prevents images from jagging up as you zoom in, while photoviewer does not.
Which behavior is preffered. Also if possible does anyone know of any low performance costing HQ filters that can improve the display of the zoomed image?

Just bicubic would do well in pretty much all cases, and lanczos3 or lanczos4 sharpening (non-instant cache-ahead turns more important here, as these filters along with sequential picture browsing when set for autofitting the a display window can bring a cpu spike for cached-ahead big pics/RAWs.
For sprites, pixel art and GIFs though, I presume leaving the possibility for no smoothing would look better, as long as the image isnt fully rerendered at another resolution everytime you zoom it up/down (classic facepalm material from the lousy Irfan).

Quote:

Maybe we can use the same zoom filter as firefox's? it seems to be relatively good quality.

Firefox' sucks big time if you ask me. Quick bilinear doesnt get any worse. Many smoothing/sharpening filters are available with DEVIL and Imagemagick already.
I'd be very interested to see an implementation for HQ4x for multilayer images (the most appropriate material to apply that one to IMO, edges looks kinda ugly due to unoptimal edge separation in singlelayer pics)

__________________

Last edited by Hard core Rikki; July 31st, 2009 at 21:12..

Squall-Leonhart · July 31st, 2009

Rikki, filter changed at around 3.0.4...

Attached Images

Pasted_Data_0afa.jpg (247.1 KB, 43 views)

__________________

VBA-M | Xtemu | NGOHQ | Post Impact Productions | TNHW | XBCD 0.2.6 | Satanic666's Emulator Compiles
Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct
Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!.
If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help.
Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

**Hard core Rikki** · July 31st, 2009

I was certainly not making mention to that of the old versions. If it still sucks in 3.5, you bet it did in the earlier 3.x branch as well.

__________________

Mad · July 31st, 2009

The ability to open TGA files, which Windows Photo Viewer cant.

__________________
[Windows 7 RTM PRO X64] [Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L] [Intel E5200@2.5Ghz] [Corsair XMS2 DHX 4GB DDR2 800MHz] [HIS HD4670 1GB GDDR3] [19" LCD SyncMaster T190] [Samsung SATA II HD322HJ 320GB] [LG HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GH22NS30]
(@gigaherz) S.N.K.M.A.D.: Synthetic Networked Killing and Masterful Assassination Device

**Kirby** · July 31st, 2009

sign me up.

I just want something that will have a few more features than the windows picture viewer. I don't need all the features that Irfanview and Xnview provides

__________________

AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ @ 2.68GHz, Radeon HD4850 512MB, 2GB PC3200 2-3-2-5, ABit AN8-SLi, Sound Blaster X-FI XtremeMusic

**@ruantec** · July 31st, 2009

Ok i took some times today as i promise Squall and started to code the app so here´s a small report of what i´ve done sofar:

-Classes implemented.
-Gif, jpg, bmp, png, tiff etc. supported.
-Shell interaction support(select @ruanViewer as your default app pic viewer).
-Gif animation support(still some small things to fix but it works at least).
-Drop-Shadow effect to give a better look to the pic frame.
-Gradient background for a stylish look.

here are some pics of the app in action:

Thats all for now... enjoy!

Regards
@ruantec

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

Last edited by @ruantec; July 31st, 2009 at 23:45..

**Kirby** · July 31st, 2009

what language do you code in again? I forgot

one big request I have is the use of the mouse wheel to view the prev/next image in the directory

__________________

AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ @ 2.68GHz, Radeon HD4850 512MB, 2GB PC3200 2-3-2-5, ABit AN8-SLi, Sound Blaster X-FI XtremeMusic

**@ruantec** · July 31st, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kirby

what language do you code in again? I forgot

one big request I have is the use of the mouse wheel to view the prev/next image in the directory

The language i use to code the app is C# and the tool of course VS2008

and thanks for the mouse wheel idea... it should be easy to do.

----------------------------------------------------

Here are some information i forgot to mention on my previous post:

-Hardware acceleration(yes am using hardware acceleration to render the pics

as the classes used are from @ES)
-True Aero support(done after i posted the pics as squall requested)

Here are some pics again:

Regards
@ruantec

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

Last edited by @ruantec; July 31st, 2009 at 23:23..

**ShendoXT** · August 1st, 2009

Looking good, I like the aero support

.

__________________

strike105x · August 1st, 2009

Me to awesome job so far XD.

__________________

|Strike's Deviantart|Anime List|Important Notice|

gamefreak94 · August 1st, 2009

Nice work there @ruantec!

IMHO, basically as many features as can be imported from FastStone Image Viewer would be a good thing since that app just rocks! I know its UI is rather complicated but what I was thinking you could so is 2 display modes, a basic one and an advanced mode. So it doesn't get complicated unless it needs to.

P.S. The batch format conversion tool in FS is one of my favs.

__________________

How to configure uTorrent for maximum upload and download speed?

**@ruantec** · August 1st, 2009

Thanks guys!!

i took some time today again to re-check what i´ve done and noticed a small memory leak in the png handling code. so i fixed the problem and went to the next step which is APNG support! YAY!!!

Here is a small video demostration:

NOTE:
The hanging at the beginning isn´t from @ruanViewer.. it was caused by an application i had running in the background.

__________________

Current development tools:

Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6

strike105x · August 1st, 2009

Nice work, verry nice indeed

.

__________________

|Strike's Deviantart|Anime List|Important Notice|

gamefreak94 · August 1st, 2009

Seriously, you managed to make that much in just a day?

It pwns Windows Pic and Fax Viewer at running GIFs/APNGs already (very smooth, unlike with WPFV you get lots of stuttering).

__________________

How to configure uTorrent for maximum upload and download speed?

July 31st, 2009	#1 (permalink)
Squall-Leonhart Behind ur girlfriend :D Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 18,953	@ruanViewer - Picture Viewer replacement for Windows Photo Viewer. This is a suggestions and idea's (and potentially beta release) thread for an App i suggested to @Ruantec I've noted on various forums, that users are less then enthusiastic about Windows Photo Viewer on Vista/7, and that others consider it Bloated / Stunted and not to be nearly anywhere near as fast as the XP Picture and Fax Viewer. So I put it forward to @Ruantec, and asked him if he would be interested in making such an app. Well, this thread is to say that Yes he is, interested, and he (and myself) are interested in knowing what other people would like in the app . Some idea's so far, Cooliris style thumbnail viewer, done right it will obviously be better then cooliris heh. Selecting next/previous picture using the left and right directional buttons. Set as Desktop background (without the pathetic jpg compression, noted to be in photo viewer by Strike) The same, or similar right click menu that exists when you click an image in picture and fax viewer. APNG and Animated Gif support Red eye removal. Resizer tool, with quality slider to adjust save size. More idea's are welcome Edit. Picture and Fax viewer has a Zoom filter that prevents images from jagging up as you zoom in, while photoviewer does not. Which behavior is preffered. Also if possible does anyone know of any low performance costing HQ filters that can improve the display of the zoomed image? Maybe we can use the same zoom filter as firefox's? it seems to be relatively good quality. __________________ VBA-M \| Xtemu \| NGOHQ \| Post Impact Productions \| TNHW \| XBCD 0.2.6 \| Satanic666's Emulator Compiles Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!. If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help. Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman. Last edited by Squall-Leonhart; July 31st, 2009 at 12:32..

Thread Tools
Show Printable Version Email this Page
Display Modes
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode

July 31st, 2009	#2 (permalink)
strike105x Bruce Willis as Ichigo... Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: ...means Bleach ends after episode 1 Posts: 3,586	Verry nice news XD. Now for something useful in this post of mine: Well imho except for adding to what you said: 1 a rotate clockwise/counter clockwise option; 2 maybe tweaking the the set as background option to have the following options: Center, Tile, Stretched, Fit (where the image fits the screen without loosing any aspect ratio), and maybe fill (same as fit image does not loose aspect ratio but it fills the whole screen, i for one can do without but this app its not addressed to me in particular :P). 3. And lets not forget about slideshow which should be like the fax viewer one except also having options like (center, stretched, fit and maybe fill); Anything more (like some extra editing options for example) would be bloat imo and can be done better in a app made for editing probably, like gimp for example, the thing about fax viewer which we all liked was its simplicity so that's probably the goal for this to. __________________ \|Strike's Deviantart\|Anime List\|Important Notice\|

July 31st, 2009	#3 (permalink)
Squall-Leonhart Behind ur girlfriend :D Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 18,953	i didn't think i needed to mention the rotate functions as its a stock setting of picture and fax viewer __________________ VBA-M \| Xtemu \| NGOHQ \| Post Impact Productions \| TNHW \| XBCD 0.2.6 \| Satanic666's Emulator Compiles Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!. If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help. Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

July 31st, 2009	#4 (permalink)
Hard core Rikki And the science gets done Join Date: May 2004 Location: Perpetual Pompei Posts: 7,221	- The DEVIL image library or ImageMagick could be used as a start base. It also supports many of the such functionalties people expect from an image viewer. Its LesserGPL, so possible to include with closed-source apps. ImageMagick is more Imageviewer material, also since it supports more formats and features out of the box (its BSD too), and can allow for basic image-editing capabilities. - A thumbnail collecting database wouldnt be bad, along with maintainance operations, like purging dead entries, reoptimizing, and advance thumbnail generating (like generating a folder's thumbnails in advance). - Some hardware-accelerated display (but color-accurate operations like zooming). - 3 thumbs up for cache-ahead and cached/viewed pics kept in memory for faster sequential display. Some image viewers suck specifically for absence/medicrity of this one. - skipping the integrated functions DEVIL and ImageMagick can already handle out of the box, like HDR support, format conversion, multithread/core parallelization, integrated and manually colorspace support and manually set ones for display in app, RAW (the windows7 one does not support RAWs, so this one's likely to be one of imageviewers most interesting points of differentiation from the win7 app)... - some quickupload strings for imageshack, flickr, photobucket, email and the likes maybe. - thumbnail preview generating if rightclicking on pic in Explorer (as desktop integration, desirably opt-in just to be safe). I was thinking of suggesting the same in the past, funnily enough (along with other small apps, possibly for an aruantec 'collection'. One single apps cant be fit with everything, and separation makes for an interesting portfolio). __________________ deviantART \| Blog \| Webcomics \| VBA-M \| PCSX2 \| @ES \| Shendo \| GeneralEmu \| XTemu Get the NGemu toolbar http://ngemu.ourtoolbar.com Last edited by Hard core Rikki; July 31st, 2009 at 14:12..

July 31st, 2009	#5 (permalink)
Squall-Leonhart Behind ur girlfriend :D Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 18,953	xD, i've wanted to for ages, but i never knew the right person to ask __________________ VBA-M \| Xtemu \| NGOHQ \| Post Impact Productions \| TNHW \| XBCD 0.2.6 \| Satanic666's Emulator Compiles Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!. If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help. Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

July 31st, 2009	#6 (permalink)
Silenus Pilgrim Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Hyperion Posts: 3,387	Great ideas guys. Hope something really good comes out of this. __________________ --ASUS G50VT-X1 - P8400 2.5GHZ - Geforce 9800GS 512MB - HDD 320GB - 4GB DDR2 800MHZ - WINDOWS 7 64 BIT - ZALMAN NC2000-- ...Mis sueños son mentiras que algun día dejarán de serlo...

July 31st, 2009	#9 (permalink)
Hard core Rikki And the science gets done Join Date: May 2004 Location: Perpetual Pompei Posts: 7,221	I was certainly not making mention to that of the old versions. If it still sucks in 3.5, you bet it did in the earlier 3.x branch as well. __________________ deviantART \| Blog \| Webcomics \| VBA-M \| PCSX2 \| @ES \| Shendo \| GeneralEmu \| XTemu Get the NGemu toolbar http://ngemu.ourtoolbar.com

July 31st, 2009	#10 (permalink)
Mad AKA snkmad Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: Brazil, Fortaleza-Ceará Posts: 3,303	The ability to open TGA files, which Windows Photo Viewer cant. __________________ [Windows 7 RTM PRO X64] [Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L] [Intel E5200@2.5Ghz] [Corsair XMS2 DHX 4GB DDR2 800MHz] [HIS HD4670 1GB GDDR3] [19" LCD SyncMaster T190] [Samsung SATA II HD322HJ 320GB] [LG HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GH22NS30] (@gigaherz) S.N.K.M.A.D.: Synthetic Networked Killing and Masterful Assassination Device

July 31st, 2009	#11 (permalink)
Kirby red like my stool Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Massachusetts, USA Posts: 9,036	sign me up. I just want something that will have a few more features than the windows picture viewer. I don't need all the features that Irfanview and Xnview provides __________________ AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ @ 2.68GHz, Radeon HD4850 512MB, 2GB PC3200 2-3-2-5, ABit AN8-SLi, Sound Blaster X-FI XtremeMusic

July 31st, 2009	#12 (permalink)
@ruantec Emu author Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Austria (originally from Dominican Republic) Posts: 2,381	Ok i took some times today as i promise Squall and started to code the app so here´s a small report of what i´ve done sofar: -Classes implemented. -Gif, jpg, bmp, png, tiff etc. supported. -Shell interaction support(select @ruanViewer as your default app pic viewer). -Gif animation support(still some small things to fix but it works at least). -Drop-Shadow effect to give a better look to the pic frame. -Gradient background for a stylish look. here are some pics of the app in action: Thats all for now... enjoy! Regards @ruantec __________________ Current development tools: Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++ Visual Basic 6 Last edited by @ruantec; July 31st, 2009 at 23:45..

July 31st, 2009	#13 (permalink)
Kirby red like my stool Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Massachusetts, USA Posts: 9,036	what language do you code in again? I forgot one big request I have is the use of the mouse wheel to view the prev/next image in the directory __________________ AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ @ 2.68GHz, Radeon HD4850 512MB, 2GB PC3200 2-3-2-5, ABit AN8-SLi, Sound Blaster X-FI XtremeMusic

August 1st, 2009	#15 (permalink)
ShendoXT Moderator Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Croatia Posts: 4,191	Looking good, I like the aero support . __________________ C2D E8400 3.00 Ghz \| EP45-DS3 \| HD4850 512MB \| 4GB DDR2 800 \| 640 + 250 GB HDD SyncMaster 2233BW 22" \| Logitech G5 \| Logitech G15 \| Windows 7 x64

August 1st, 2009	#16 (permalink)
strike105x Bruce Willis as Ichigo... Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: ...means Bleach ends after episode 1 Posts: 3,586	Me to awesome job so far XD. __________________ \|Strike's Deviantart\|Anime List\|Important Notice\|

August 1st, 2009	#17 (permalink)
gamefreak94 Die anime!! Die!! Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: پاكستان <--- Urdu Posts: 6,287	Nice work there @ruantec! IMHO, basically as many features as can be imported from FastStone Image Viewer would be a good thing since that app just rocks! I know its UI is rather complicated but what I was thinking you could so is 2 display modes, a basic one and an advanced mode. So it doesn't get complicated unless it needs to. P.S. The batch format conversion tool in FS is one of my favs. __________________ How to configure uTorrent for maximum upload and download speed?

August 1st, 2009	#18 (permalink)
@ruantec Emu author Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Austria (originally from Dominican Republic) Posts: 2,381	Thanks guys!! i took some time today again to re-check what i´ve done and noticed a small memory leak in the png handling code. so i fixed the problem and went to the next step which is APNG support! YAY!!! Here is a small video demostration: NOTE: The hanging at the beginning isn´t from @ruanViewer.. it was caused by an application i had running in the background. __________________ Current development tools: Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++ Visual Basic 6

August 1st, 2009	#19 (permalink)
strike105x Bruce Willis as Ichigo... Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: ...means Bleach ends after episode 1 Posts: 3,586	Nice work, verry nice indeed . __________________ \|Strike's Deviantart\|Anime List\|Important Notice\|

August 1st, 2009	#20 (permalink)
gamefreak94 Die anime!! Die!! Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: پاكستان <--- Urdu Posts: 6,287	Seriously, you managed to make that much in just a day? It pwns Windows Pic and Fax Viewer at running GIFs/APNGs already (very smooth, unlike with WPFV you get lots of stuttering). __________________ How to configure uTorrent for maximum upload and download speed?