Need a FAST, lightweight RAW viewer

[tirediron]

All, looking for a fast viewing application to scroll through large numbers of NEF files. I use Nikon Capture for my primary RAW editor, and while it's good at what it does, it's NOT a good way to scroll through a lot of images. I want something that will let me look at them, no editing at all, just view them, quickly. Doesn't have to 100%, even half-screen would be fine. I've tried Irfanview, Microsoft picture & fax viewer, all too slow. Lightroom is good for that, but I'm not going to buy it just for that. Free would be ideal, but I don't mind paying a reasonable price.

Tks

[Ads]

[Overread]

I'll attach myself here as well! I have found that windows picture viewer tends to start to really slow down my computer to a crawl if I make it look at more than 100 RAW files - it gets really annoying when it takes such a long time to go through stuff.

[jnsuffolk]

try faststone its pretty fast and works well

[Kegger]

I use the gallery in photoshop. It lets you do just that, scroll through large numbers of .NEF file rather quickly.

[Flash Harry]

file browser in PSCS. H

[tsaraleksi]

Photo Mechanic is the gold standard for this kind of thing. It's pricey but it's the best. That said, if you don't need a lot of its features it may be a bit of a waste (things like amazingly easy batch captioning, a million and one variables you can input into a file name, detailed and extensive file rating system, its own FTP client, code replacement for captions [you make a list of say, players names keyed to their numbers. When you have that player in a photo, you enter a code, for a basketball player it might be \b24\ or whatever. As you type this, it turns into the entry from your list. ]) All of those things are huge time savers if you need them but I'd hesitate to shell out if you don't need anything like that.

[SrBiscuit]

i've only ever used Bridge for that....works well for me

[Big Mike]

I have used Irfanview. It's a free image viewing software and it's actually pretty good at small batch tasks as well. There is an additional download that gives you RAW viewing capabilities but I'm not sure how 'up to date' it is.

The biggest benefit is that it's a very light program and doesn't hog resources. Plus, it's free.