How do you view your photos?

[Drake]

Sounds silly, doesn't it? Turn's out it's not that simple. I have my photo library neatly organized in Lightroom, every image has some adjustments applied, keywords etc. But I just hate viewing the images later in Lightroom. Despite having my previews set to the largest size and high quality, the images seem kind of soft to me when viewed in loupe view mode.

So let's say a friend visits and he asks you to show some shots from that trip last year, what do you do? Fire up Lightroom/Aperture? Or do you have an exported resized and sharpened set of images that you view in the system image browser or any other software? I am not asking about the shots you get paid for. I am interested how you deal with the family photos and the ones you do for fun.

Since I am just an amateur and my photo library is only a couple thousand shots, I am thinking about exporting it all resized and properly sharpened for viewing on screen. I could upload it to dropbox to have it synced across my PCs, and also my home theater PC to view it on a TV.

So basically what I am asking is what you do after the typical workflow. Your images are edited, saved, backed up etc. How do you view them?

And yeah, I know, images look best on paper. But you don't print all of them, do you?

 

[MReid]

Yeah images look like crap in the Lightroom viewer.

I use a photo viewer I think it is Nero Photosnap Viewer.

The photos look exactly like the prints will look.

 

[Joey_Ricard]

Adobe bridge CS renders a good image and you can view on a black background at a decent size.

Viewers such as the one that comes with a version of MS windows will work, but does not generate the best rendering of colors and sharpness necessarily.

 

[HughGuessWho]

For just simply and quick viewing my pics, I use irfanview. It has a very small footprint, has all of the basic viewing I need (full size, fit screen, rotae etc), EXIF viewer and even is able to open most RAW files. And best of all, you can download and use free version.

 

[MLeeK]

Are you saying that you never export the image to a jpeg from LR? You are leaving your edits and your originals as database/xmp and original image?
Once I am finished with my raw editing everything is polished and saved to a full sized jpeg. If I kept all of my raw images I'd have a few hundred hard drives full of stuff. At which point you can view through any image viewer you want to view through.

 

[Bossy]

I use Preview usually. Or the finder window...

 

[DiskoJoe]

I just use the windows viewer.

 

[Drake]

Are you saying that you never export the image to a jpeg from LR? You are leaving your edits and your originals as database/xmp and original image?
Once I am finished with my raw editing everything is polished and saved to a full sized jpeg. If I kept all of my raw images I'd have a few hundred hard drives full of stuff. At which point you can view through any image viewer you want to view through.

Yep, I pretty much use Lightroom both for organizing/editing and viewing my images once they are done. My library has a couple thousand images (less than 100gb) so it's not really a problem hardware-wise. But as I said, the quality of previews in Lightroom, even in the slideshow module, is far worse than when the images are exported and viewed as jpegs in other software. Until now I only exported the images I wanted to share with my family and friends, but now, as I mentioned, I am planning on exporting and having a copy of my whole library as ~2000px jpegs, sharpened for screen viewing and synced across my devices for easy access.

 

[Joel_W]

When I'm done editing my RAW files, I convert them to high quality JPEGS. I don't use Elements or MS photo organizer sytem, preferring my own simple system. I view my JPEGS using Windows Live Gallery Viewer, which is the default program that comes with XP, Vista, And Windows 7. BTW, after every editing session, the final JPEGS are backed up to a remote drive for storage.