Private image viewers for Windows 11

Questions
1

Hello, I would like to ask for help to find alternatives to the native Windows 11 image viewer, since I uninstalled it on the recommendation of the forum, now I would like to find a safe and private alternative. I heard about ImageGlass ( GitHub - d2phap/ImageGlass: 🏞 A fast, open-source, modern image viewer for 90+ formats – including WEBP, GIF, SVG, AVIF, JXL, HEIC and more – built for smooth browsing across Windows, macOS, and Linux. · GitHub ) but I don’t know if it’s really safe.

What is your favorite private image viewer?

Thank you.

2

Where did you get that advice? Seems like bad advice tbh. I don’t think replacing the photo viewer makes any sense, but I might be missing something.

3

Hi, I couldn’t find the link where it was suggested that uninstalling the image viewer wasn’t a bad idea—it was here on PrivacyGuides. In that same “post” I discovered that I could use Winget to update and install programs more securely.
It listed a number of programs pre-installed on Windows 11 that might or might not be useful.:thinking:

For now, I’ve installed Nomacs. :laughing:
Btw I always hated Windows native image viewer lol

4

I use nomacs. Simply because it’s a simple useful program that does what image viewer should do

5

Depends on how you use it and what image types you actually use.

digiKam is more of a photo management tool (think photo album organisation). But it’s very fully featured and can of course view pretty much any image type.
It’s what I ended up using most of the time I looked at photos.

My current pick for a photo viewer is qView. Mostly for startup time compared to digiKam.
But it’s basic. Basically just a box with the photo in it.

I have used ImageGlass before. It’s a longstanding project, given that I last used it before 2020.
It’s well designed and loaded quickly, though I think it did some sort of smart background preloading based on the order photo’s are navigated in.
It is made by a lone developer in Vietnam. But the app is well built, well designed and has been that way for basically the last decade. There’s a reason it still tops many open source lists.