[bignatslover]

I used to swear by Irfanview but its last upgrades lost some customization ability, including the ability to remember screen sizes and to hold the same window size during slideshow viewing.

Any other feature-rich image viewers you like out there to run on a PC (I am on Windows 7, if that matters)?

[TheZookie007]

Picasa

[bignatslover]

Picasa

Looks excellent, although this gave me reserve:
"When Picasa is first booted up, users are presented with the option of using the program as their default photo viewer. This is to be highly recommended as the program is pretty much the best photo viewer that you will ever encounter. Should you agree to this The right-hand side of your screen will then display a graphic which indicates all of the photographs held on your hard drive being sucked into Picasa's database. "

Creating a database of all my images?  Errrm, probably not good for when family comes over.

[TheZookie007]

As far as I've been able to discover, the databases in question are stored locally at any of the following locations (depending on operating system):

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2Albums

or
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\

[solvegas]

Shouldn't this be in the computer tech help section of the forum ? 

[bignatslover]

Shouldn't this be in the computer tech help section of the forum ? 

Yes, I realized that after I started the thread.   

[Palomine]

This doesn't answer the original question and (I know that) no one asked my opinion, but I wanted to say that I'm not wild about Irfanview the few times I used it and I detest Picasa (when I tried it some time ago). In fact, I dislike iPhoto just as much as Picasa... I refuse to use any image viewer app that requires the creation of a database of proxy images to function. I cannot tell you how many hours of my life I've wasted trying to find missing source images and or de-dupe images for less-computer-literate friends and neighbors who use iPhoto or Picasa (usually by default, knowing little about it) and then wonder why they have so many problems down the road. As simple as it seems, not everyone groks the concept of a symbolic link or how it can be broken. IMO, apps like Picasa and iPhoto should make the creation/use of a database AN OPTION, not a requirement.

Personally, I prefer small/minimalist photo viewer programs that simply open an image file and display it, sometimes with a modest set of viewing/processing tools included. As I'm among the 1 or 2% of users here who run Linux, I won't bother recommending any specific viewer that I use... but generally, I wind up using whatever one(s) were installed by default when I installed my operating system. If I need a more involved tool set, I open the image file with GIMP (there are also programs that are more involved/oriented towards photographers such as Aperature in MacOS, but I don't generally need such tools).

Given my other posts this morning (mostly in the Computer Help forum) you'd think that I woke up in a particularly curmudgeonly mood, but I assure you this isn't the case: I always disliked image viewer programs that create/utilize databases of proxy/imported images.

[Nimrod]

I reviewed several image viewers about 2 years ago and at the time did not like the Picasa approach and interface.
I had been using Irfanview on and off but did not like the interface much.

We ended up going with:
Xnview

It basically follows the Irfanview approach however it has a better interface and has more options.
It has only a few basic image editing tools - but it is a VIEWER and does it very well.
There are also some good management tools, like batch renaming and meta-data review.

I just like Xnview over Irfanview because it is faster, almost never crashes and just had a better tool set.

Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XnView

Attached is a screen capture of XnView in action:
I pointed the viewer to our collection of older BEA avatars the nice thing is that animated GIFs and the like will animate in the preview pane as seen with the difference between Scotchman's avatar (BE girl in green).