Free full-featured photo viewer

The standard photo viewer in Windows is quite limited in functions and features, so I’d recommend you use a third-party viewer.

Shock View is probably one of the best choices around: a lightweight, intuitive yet full-featured photo viewer packed with some interesting tools with which you can do some basic editing to your photos in a very easy way.

The program’s interface follows the traditional viewer scheme of disk structure on the left side, contents of the selected folder displayed as thumbnails on the right side and a small preview window where you can see the selected picture. Also, a double-click on any thumbnail will open it up in full screen.

Besides viewing photos, you can also use Shock View to do small editing tasks such as rotating, resizing, cropping, converting from one format to another and even removing the red-eye effect. On a more creative side you can also add a frame or border to your pictures (with quite a few to choose from) and also fun clipart like notes, comic balloons and several other signs and symbols.

Shock View is generally easy to use, though the clipart area needs to be improved to make it more usable. Now it doesn’t support drag and drop, and the text tool doesn’t let you preview font appearance before adding the text field to the image – and once you’ve added it, you can’t update it with changes.

Shock View is a lightweight, full featured photo viewer with basic editing tools, perfect for simple everyday tasks.