XnView is a great FREE image viewer. It comes to us from France. Who says the French can’t write good software? Hmmm…maybe nobody…I just heard it somewhere :) . I have tried many free image viewers and photo organization software and found only a few decent ones. Commercial software is somewhat better but you can find FREE software that works the same sometimes better than commercial software. XnView is one example of FREE image viewers that works great.
6 video modules - over 30 videos containing step-by-step instructions for Windows or Mac programs like Lightroom, ACDSee, Picasa and Photos.
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Completely self-paced. Learn at your own pace and take as long as you want until you learn how to organize your photos. More info
Quick Feature List
Here are a few features that I found very useful:
- Directory Tree direct view
- Bulk renaming
- Cropping
- Image Resizing
- Red-eye reduction
- Support for IPTC keyword insertion
- U3 version available (if you don’t know what U3 is, then you don’t care).
Well, you find these in just about any image viewer and yes it’s true…however, this program is very fast and very simple to use…just check it out.
What I like about XnView
- No need to import folders. You just open your folder structure and you see your pictures.
- Images appear in tabs which makes for easy navigation
- Very easy to use tool for removing red-eye
- Support for viewing videos
- Screen capture tool
What I don’t like about XnView
- The cropping tool is very inefficient. You do see how much you’re cropping but you can’t specify the exact dimensions of the window you want to crop.
- Thumbnails are somewhat slow to appear.
- Right-click menu is very hard to get it to show up. I have to click multiple times. My mouse has to be completely still when I press the right button.
- Support for email is limited to using your local client. Doesn’t support exporting to a zip file or just making smaller copies of the pictures.
Conclusion
Out of the many FREE Image Viewers available, XnView deserves a good look. Even though I have some reservations about its user interface I do believe it’s worth trying. If you really need support for IPTC keywords, then this is only one of the few FREE Image Viewers that support this standard.
Resources
Essentials for organizing your digital photos
Here are the essential products and services I have come to rely on for many years to keep my media collection organized and safe. Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them. 
Excellent Lightroom and Picasa alternative. If you need a cheaper and simpler photo manager then ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac (save 20% until Feb 15) or ACDSee Pro for Windows (save $20 until Feb 15) is my preferred solution for organizing all my media. It has a very fast browser, great image editing and it's simple to use.
If you do a lot of image editing like I do, I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC via the annual Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom has best photo editing capabilities even though it comes with a steeper learning curve. If you do image editing, Adobe Lightroom is my favorite.
I recommend Backblaze Cloud Backup for affordable & reliable unlimited cloud backup. I have been using Backblaze for backing up all pictures & videos for more than 5 years now. All my invaluable digital memories are safe and secure. This is the best solution especially if you have a large quantity of media files.
Use a reliable & affordable external hard drive for backing up everything on your computer. It is absolutely essential for keeping all your memories backed up and safe.
Start organizing now using detailed, step-by-step instructions and videos:
Personal Coaching (closed) Independent Course Private Lessons
Reference book Basics book Picasa book
YOURS FREE! 10 crucial steps most people miss when organizing their digital photos
Most people want to just organize their digital pictures and ignore these crucial steps right at the beginning...when they are shooting and transferring their digital pictures. Then they wonder why they can't organize their digital photos! Avoid most people's mistakes and start on the right track!
Try Picasa 3.5 from Google. It’s free, fast and it has all that cool tagging options :)
Brentt, thank you for your suggestion. Yes Picasa does support tagging…at least it started supporting image tagging. It’s not necessarily fast but it it a good program…at least it’s getting much better since Google bought it.