The free image viewer XnView is a great tool for reviewing and culling photos from your digital camera. It offers a nice full screen view, red eye correction, slide shows, and a utility for comparing up to 4 photos side-by-side. This tutorial will show you how to use the compare feature. This is useful when you have several similar pictures and you're deciding which versions to keep and which to cull.
Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: n/a
Here's How:
- Open XnView and navigate to a folder of pictures on your computer, camera, or card reader.
- Select (up to) four similar pictures by clicking on the first one and Ctrl-clicking additional thumbnails.
- Choose Tools > Compare.
- The four images will be displayed in a grid with a small toolbar for each image.
- The toolbar lets you zoom in or out, fit the image to the screen, zoom to 100% magnification, close the picture from the compare view, and delete the file. See tips below for working with the toolbar.
- At the bottom of the compare window, there is a checkbox for "Use Tabs." Check this box to put the four images into tabs rather than a grid. This is useful for seeing more of the images but you will need to switch tabs to see each one instead of viewing them side-by-side. Uncheck the box to return to grid view.
- Click the OK button at the bottom of the screen when you are finished comparing your pictures.
Tips:
- When you zoom in or out, all four images are zoomed by the same amount.
- When you zoom in so that the image is larger than its display area, you can click and drag on an image to pan it. As you pan, each photo is panned in unison, making it easy to compare the actual pixels in each image.
- The fifth button on the toolbar lets you close only that image from the compare view.
- The sixth button, the red X, deletes the image file (you will receive a confirmation dialog).
