Windows Picture and Fax Viewer is an image viewer that is a part of the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. It is based on GDI+ and is capable of viewing images format supported by GDI+, namely, JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF (including animated GIFs), ICO, WMF, EMF and TIFF format files. If you open any of the image format mentioned above in Windows XP, it will by default opened in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.
Apart from its rudimentary image rotating tool and its TIFF annotation feature, the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer only views, and does not edit images. The viewer program starts up if any of the picture format files is double clicked. You won’t find a shortcut in Windows Start Menu and there is no executable (.exe) file for it. It is implemented as a dynamic-link library file called shimgvw.dll. This program is normally located at “%systemroot%\system32\shimgvw.dll”, and can be run from the command prompt or through a shortcut pointing to “rundll32.exe %systemroot%\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscreen”
Although this program superseded part of the functions of Imaging for Windows in previous versions of Windows, it can still be improved by adding 200+ image support.
ImageXtender is a unique free application that teaches your Windows XP image viewer to understand more than 200 image formats which includes such long forgotten formats as *.msp, *.gem. together with really rare ones, such as *.cals and *.dpx. When you install ImageXtender, it builds itself into your operating system (Windows XP), and registers all known extensions pf graphics files so that they can be viewed with Windows XP standard viewer. So, the process of viewing any images won’t differ from viewing image formats available before.
Once ImageXtender is installed, you can run ImageXtender from Windows Start Menu to select the file types which you would like to see in Windows Explorer. All image types are selected by default. Then you can view images in 3 different modes: Preview, Thumbnails and Filmstrip.
Just launch Windows Explorer and open a folder containing image files, and you’ll be able to view files of available formats in preview mode. Besides, the “Details” section located in the left pane of Windows Explorer will display all file info – its type, size and date of creation.
To view graphics files in Thumbnails mode, just launch Windows Explorer and open a folder containing image files, then go to Windows Explorer menu and select View-Thumbnails.
To view images in Filmstrip mode, launch Windows Explorer and open a folder containing image files, then go to Windows Explorer menu and select Filmstrip. Click the image file to view it in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer modes.
ImageXtender can be installed on Windows XP only and doesn’t support Vista. The picture viewer in Windows Vista, renamed Windows Photo Gallery Viewer, is completely rewritten and is based on Windows Photo Gallery which uses the Windows Imaging Component (WIC). The underlying graphics engine pipeline has been overhauled with support for large and high bit depth HDR images. ImageXtender is truly a nice free add-on which allows you view practically any kind of image file without installing/opening a separate program which is very convenient.
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