A simple photo viewer with retouching tools

Browsing your digital photos on your PC can be a cumbersome affair using the Windows Photo Viewer. If you’re looking for a replacement, you could give Alternate Pic View Lite a go.

Alternate Pic View Lite lets you browse your photo collection in several ways: as small-sized thumbnails, inside the program’s window, in full screen or even as a slideshow. What’s more, Alternate Pic View Lite includes a pretty varied array of filters and effects you can apply to your images, including rotation, color and brightness adjustment, greyscale and red eye fix, among others.

So far, so good. The problem comes when you have to deal with the interface in Alternate Pic View Lite: it just doesn’t work like the other photo viewers. To begin with, it shows the selected folder content in a window that’s too small to be comfortable. Then, each photo has to be double-clicked in order to be displayed (instead of just selecting it with the mouse). Also, viewing options in Alternate Pic View Lite are not saved between photos, so you have to be constantly resizing images in order to view them.

Alternate Pic View Lite could be a good photo viewer with some nice editing tools and special effects. Too bad the interface is lacking in usability.