no decent native image viewer in os x?

I think you are still thinking too much like a windows user. iPhoto is not just for you to view your images, its for you to store them as well. It sounds like you're keeping your photos in a folder somewhere else. Thats what iPhoto IS FOR, so you don't have to keep other picture folders.

select all the pictures you want(shift or apple click) and then double click the group

iPhoto sucks, it's bloated and slow as hell. I don't blame the poster for not wanting to use it. He/she is right, OS X really lacks a good, simple, useful image viewer. As a substitute for Preview I've noticed that JView is a little better. I never slideshow, but I know there are a lot of apps that do this - try Versiontracker.

Firstly, if you are not a photo professional then iPhoto is really great at keeping all your photos organized. Don't worry about where the actual image files reside on your hard disk, just let iPhoto do all that behind the scenes. If you want to find a photo just open up iPhoto, then you can do all sorts of powerful things. You can sort by date. You can give photos a star rating and then sort by rating so all your favorites jump to the top. You can add keywords like "family" to a group of photos and then when you want to find the photos among your collection that are of your family you just type in "family" to the search field and they all pop right up. Actually, as soon as you type the letter "f" without even hitting enter or anything then all you family pics will pop up. Then hit the keys apple-a to select all the photos showing and then click the slide show button. You'll see a slide show of all your family pictures with pretty dissolves and everything.

Also, just in general for working with images, download the shareware application graphicconverter (you can find it at versiontracker.com). It is not what I'd call an intuitive program, but it can do just about anything. Because of it's interface problems there is tremendous power and functionality in it that I think most people don't ever find. But it's really handy to have around and I highly recommend graphicconverter as well.

I like using Preview for viewing scanlated manga (unlicensed of course ). The only problem is that the zooming sometimes affects all images in the sidebar, which is good for me, but it doesn't always do that. When I want a slideshow, I just go to the folder that has the images, do a very generic Spotlight search in it, and run the slideshow from there.

Do you have 10.4? Preview is much faster in this release. Although still painfully slow...

When I was on 10.3, I used ACDSee as a photo viewer. It's fast, but not so modern looking.

orijinal said:

preview isn't great, iphoto is too big of a hassle to keep adding your pics in to view them...i have tried to slideshow w/ the native slideshow (select pics>menu>slideshow) but it can only select so many pictures (80 is the max i think).

anybody know a work around?

Click to expand...

Is there a max no. of photo you can select for slideshow? What happen when you Select All (⌘+A)? IMO, I can't think of any other photo organiser and viewer that perform better than iPhoto. Though it may be slow if you don't max your RAM.

Mac OS X has a Windows Explorer-ish feature:

Go to the finder and hit command-J

Turn on "Show icon preview" and there you go!

skoker said:

Mac OS X has a Windows Explorer-ish feature:

Go to the finder and hit command-J

Turn on "Show icon preview" and there you go!

Click to expand...

Great tips! I turn on the "Show item info" too.

more than iPhoto..

just dropped by the thread
I've been a photorgapher since 25 years, and I suggest to check what "PhotoReviewer" and "freePhotoConverter 3" do
Yes, Ive never been so happy with iPhoto too
I'd expected much more from Apple....

fayans said:

Is there a max no. of photo you can select for slideshow?

Click to expand...

For the Preview/Finder slide show, it uses the first 100 files in the selection, the rest are ignored.

I don't like iphoto either, actually it's borderline hatred. I have mentioned in other threads that I occasionally do 3d modeling as a hobby and have my textures sorted into folders. (stone, brick, wood..etc) I also like to look at these images at full size and have several open at once. On Windows I use ThumbsPlus which I love but can't find anythiong decent for mac. I like having my pictures in seperate folders and don't want iphoto trying to tell me how I should do it.

I just like pointing the software to a folder and looking at the images in that folder.

All these ideas are good but the fact remains OSX should have some sort of native photo previewing without having to open an app.

moot said:

All these ideas are good but the fact remains OSX should have some sort of native photo previewing without having to open an app.

Click to expand...

What exactly do you mean by photo previewing? As suggested earlier you can see a preview of the photo as a large icon directly in the folder you are in.

motulist said:

What exactly do you mean by photo previewing? As suggested earlier you can see a preview of the photo as a large icon directly in the folder you are in.

Click to expand...

i think he's talking about something like "windows picture and fax viewer" or irfanview.

homerjward said:

i think he's talking about something like "windows picture and fax viewer" or irfanview.

Click to expand...

Hmm, I don't use Windows regularly, so I don't know what that viewer is. But it sounds like it's just an application as well, just more integrated into the OS. Is that it?

motulist said:

What exactly do you mean by photo previewing? As suggested earlier you can see a preview of the photo as a large icon directly in the folder you are in.

Click to expand...

Sorry, I actually forgot you can change the size of the icon. But even at its biggest size it is hardly an efficient preview. I dont want to open an app specifically. I?am probably thinking of how windows does it and am hoping OSX could do it better.

motulist said:

Hmm, I don't use Windows regularly, so I don't know what that viewer is. But it sounds like it's just an application as well, just more integrated into the OS. Is that it?

Click to expand...

yeah, it's pretty much an os-integrated application, although really lightweight and supports really easy slideshows (say you have a folder with 30 pics in it and you open one, you can then view any pic in the folder by using the arrow keys) irfanview is basically a cross between preview for os x, picture and fax viewer, and paint, with a few filters thrown in, and it supports viewing tons of formats, even multi-layer .psd's and such

I'm really interested in something in this area too. I've also just switched and I hate iPhoto too. Basically, I'm looking for a Mac product that works along the lines of Fototime, which, unfortunately, is only available for Windoze. There's a screen shot here:

http://www.fototime.com/pages/features_fotoalbum_pro

This photo browser doesn't use albums or catalogues or any of that stuff unless you want it to. You just browse the original images via a regular hierarchic folder view down one side, each folder in your OS being browsed without any importing - the app just reads the files directly. The app builds a thumbnail file, which it lodges in the image source folder, which it uses for displaying images in the browser, but nothing else goes on. When you click on any image in that folder, you are looking at the actual file directly, but full screen. You can also use the cursor keys to move L and R through the files in the image folder.

Although this product is 29 bucks, I got a free 'previous iteration' full version from a cover disk and it's been great - exactly what I want. I'm not interested in albums and keywords and all, just being able to organise the files in my OS the way I want, and then browse the folders without jumping through hoops. Is there anything for the Mac that does the same job? I've googled freeware photo viewers and browsers and all I get is more iPhoto-type apps which need to have photos imported and organised. I've done the organisation already!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I didn't read through all the posts, but didn't apple just release another Photo product, that puts them in a slideshow w/the new iMac G5 (comes with it that is)??? I think so. I remember reading about it. Google it, Apple it, Sherlock 2 it (wait is Sherlock still on OS X 10.4???), etc.

Marky_Mark said:

I'm looking for a Mac product that works along the lines of Fototime

Click to expand...

Graphicconverter

http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/gcabout_browser.htm

Motulist, you sir, are a gentleman. Thanks very much - this will serve nicely!

motulist said:

What exactly do you mean by photo previewing? As suggested earlier you can see a preview of the photo as a large icon directly in the folder you are in.

Click to expand...

prophet621 said:

...I just like pointing the software to a folder and looking at the images in that folder.

Click to expand...

In the Finder > Pictures, ⌘+J and choose "Show icon preview" which will show you the thumbnail for each photo stored in the folder for preview.