⚡ QuickView

The High-Performance Image Viewer for Windows.

Built for Speed. Engineered for Geeks.

Direct2D Native • Modern C++23 • Dynamic Scheduling Architecture • Portable

📥 Download Latest Release • 📸 Screenshots • 🐛 Report Bug

QuickView is currently one of the fastest image viewers available on the Windows platform. We focus purely on delivering the ultimate viewing experience—leave the heavy editing to professional tools like Photoshop.

Rewritten from scratch using Direct2D and C++23, QuickView abandons legacy GDI rendering for a game-grade visual architecture. With a startup speed and rendering performance that rivals or exceeds closed-source commercial software, it is designed to handle everything from tiny icons to massive 8K RAW photos with zero latency.

🌐 Multi-Language Support: English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, Deutsch, Español, Русский

QuickView supports almost all modern and professional image formats:

• Classic: JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIF, TIFF, ICO
• Web/Modern: WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, SVG, SVGZ, JXL
• Pro/HDR: EXR, HDR, PIC, PSD, TGA, PCX, QOI, WBMP, PAM, PBM, PGM, PPM, WDP, HDP
• RAW (LibRaw): ARW, CR2, CR3, DNG, NEF, ORF, RAF, RW2, SRW, X3F, MRW, MOS, KDC, DCR, SR2, PEF, ERF, 3FR, MEF, NRW, RAW

Release Date: 2026-06-14

💡 Tip: Press F1 at any time to open the interactive Shortcut & Help overlay to review all commands and operations.

• Capsule Design: Replaced window controls with a floating top-right capsule widget featuring soft hover glow effects.
• Maximized Viewport: Compact caption buttons maximize display area for image content.

• Trigger Options: Configurable gallery visibility (Hover, Pinned, or Disabled) via dropdown settings.
• Center-Align Scroll: Selected thumbnails trigger a smooth scrolling animation to align the item to the viewport center.

• Dual Modes: Supported standard fullscreen slideshow and a new Spotlight mode (dims background to focus on active image).

• Custom Hotkeys: Fully customizable hotkeys support. Users can rebind all core actions and navigation shortcuts directly in the Settings menu.

• Stream Elimination: Removed <iostream> dependency, saving ~18.5 KB.
• Localization Compression: Deduplicated translation templates, saving ~10.5 KB.
• Icon Coordinates: Compressed vector coordinate data to 16-bit integers, saving 54 KB.
• Zero Overhead Callbacks: Devirtualized controllers and replaced std::function with C-style function pointers.

• Google Highway SIMD: Dynamic dispatching for SSE4, AVX2, AVX-512, and ARM64 NEON.
• Titan Tiling System: Handle gigapixel images with smooth 60fps panning by only decoding what's visible.
• Zero-Latency JXL (#137): Native JPEG XL support with optimized thread pooling and memory management.

"Speed is a feature."

QuickView leverages Multi-Threaded Decoding for modern formats like JXL and AVIF, delivering up to 6x faster load times on 8-core CPUs compared to standard viewers.

• Zero-Latency Preview: Smart extraction for massive RAW (ARW, CR2) and PSD files.
• Debug HUD: Press F12 to see real-time performance metrics (Decode time, Render time, Memory usage). (First time use: Please enable Debug Mode in Settings > Advanced)
  

Customize your personal viewing experience.

A fully hardware-accelerated Settings Dashboard.

• Granular Control: Tweak mouse behaviors (Pan vs. Drag), zoom sensitivity, and loop rules.
• Custom Hotkeys: Fully customizable hotkeys support. Map and rebind core actions and shortcuts directly in Settings.
• Personalized Themes: Dark, Light, and System-Sync UI modes with granular control over Accent Colors.
• Ambient Dimmer: Configurable dimming overlay that darkens the background when menus or galleries are active.
• Portable Mode: One-click toggle to switch config storage between AppData (System) and Program Folder (USB Stick).

Stay fresh, stay fast.

QuickView automatically checks for updates in the background. When a new version is available, a non-intrusive toast notification will appear. You can install the update with a single click—no browser needed.

Don't just view the image; understand the data.

• Real-time RGB Histogram: Translucent waveform overlay.
• Refactored Metadata Architecture: Faster and more accurate EXIF/Metadata parsing.
• HUD Photo Wall: Press T to summon a high-performance gallery overlay capable of virtualizing 10,000+ images.
• Smart Extension Fix: Automatically detect and repair incorrect file headers (e.g., PNG saved as JPG).
• Instant RAW Dev: One-click toggle between "Fast Preview" and "Full Quality" decoding for RAW files.
• Deep Color Analysis: Real-time display of Color Space (sRGB/P3/Rec.2020), Color Mode (YCC/RGB), and Quality Factor.

"Compare with absolute precision."

QuickView features a powerful Dual-View Compare Mode built for deep visual analysis.

• Side-by-Side Sync: Synchronized zoom, pan, and rotation between two images, allowing for millimetric inspection.
• Precision HUD: Real-time RGB Envelope Histograms and quality metrics (Entropy/Sharpness) to identify the superior shot.
• Interactive Divider: A smart, translucent divider that identifies the 'winner' of each comparison metric automatically.
  
  

"View light as it was meant to be seen."

QuickView 5.0 introduces a world-class color management suite.

• True HDR Panel: SIMD-accelerated peak luminance estimation and "HDR Pro" structural metadata (MaxCLL/FALL).
• Global Soft Proofing: Instantly preview how your photos will look when printed or converted to specialized color spaces.
• Linear workflow: 32-bit internal pipeline ensures zero banding and absolute precision.

Virtual archive browsing with zero disk impact.

Integrated lightweight unrar-mini memory engine and a high-performance Data-Oriented Design (DOD) Virtual File System (VFS).

• Zero-Unpack Memory Stream: Scan and read .zip, .rar, .cbz, and .cbr archives directly in memory. Protects SSD lifespan.
• Comic Dual Page Mode: Stitches adjacent pages side-by-side with smart dynamic scaling, providing an immersive double-page comic book experience.

Engineered for players, designers, and developers.

• Universal Playback: High-performance playback for .gif, .webp, .apng, and .avifs animation formats.
• Frame Inspector: Traverse animations frame-by-frame with Alt + Left/Right controls.
• Dirty Rect Visualizer: Real-time highlight boxes outlining the exact canvas regions decoded and refreshed by the GPU.

Specially tailored for digital artists and animators.

• Tracing Overlay (Tracing Mode): Highly customizable semi-transparent window using DirectComposition with dynamic opacity adjustment shortcuts.
• Mouse Click-Through: Pass mouse interactions straight to background drawing software (WM_EX_TRANSPARENT) while overlaying reference images.

We don't use generic codecs. We use the State-of-the-Art libraries for each format.

Press F1 at any time to view the interactive Shortcut Guide.

🗺️ Roadmap We are constantly evolving. Here is what's currently in development:

• Tracing Mode: Semi-transparent overlay mode, designed for designers to reference and trace over other windows.
• Video Wall Port: Direct output to multi-monitor visual arrays.
• Plugin System: Open architecture for community-developed codecs and filters.

⚠️ Important: QuickView uses Google Highway for dynamic SIMD dispatching. While we've broadened support to SSE4, ARM64 users enjoy full NEON acceleration.

QuickView is primarily designed as a Green & Portable application.

1. Download the QuickView_*.zip package from Releases.
2. Unzip anywhere and run QuickView.exe.
3. Use in-app Settings > Portable Mode to manage configuration storage.

If you prefer a standard Windows installation (includes a deep uninstallation tool):

• Manual: Download the QuickView_Installer_*.exe from Releases.
• Command Line:

  winget install justnullname.QuickView

⚠️ Architecture Note: The project has fully migrated to a CMake + Ninja + vcpkg build system. It uses the Clang-cl compiler and Full LTO (Link-Time Optimization) to achieve extreme binary size compression. The legacy .sln and .vcxproj files have been deprecated and removed.

1. Visual Studio 2022 (with the "Desktop development with C++" workload installed).
2. LLVM / Clang Toolchain (Ensure clang-cl.exe and lld-link.exe are added to your system's PATH).
3. CMake and Ninja (Bundled with VS or installed separately).
4. Git.

After cloning the repository, run the following two commands in the root directory:

# 1. Automatically fetch dependencies via vcpkg and configure the Release-LTO build matrix
cmake --preset Release-LTO

# 2. Launch the Ninja backend for multi-core compilation and LTO linking
cmake --build out/build/Release-LTO

The final executable will be located in the out/build/Release-LTO/ directory.

QuickView stands on the shoulders of giants. Licensed under GPL-3.0. Special thanks to David Kleiner (original JPEGView) and the maintainers of LibRaw, Google Wuffs, dav1d, and libjxl.