WildBit Viewer 5.8

Rated 40/50 by bobad at Jan 26, 2008

This is a nice free viewer. Since FastStone is widely acknowledged as best Freeware picture viewer, the following review compares it relative to FastStone. With a little tweaking, one can set WildBit up to somewhat emulate FS. It has pretty good setup options, but keyboard control is unconventional and not customizable. It's billed as "compact and fast", but it's considerably larger and slower. It has far fewer features, and the default configuration isn't nearly as useful or intuitive. Also the editor is weak, but I don't downgrade a viewer for lack of editing features. Compared to FS, I rate it a 3. If FS did not exist, I would rate it close to a 5. If I was a world class programmer, and wanted to create a popular Freeware program, an image viewer is the last thing I would tackle. That's because FS has such a solid lock on the genre. However, I encourage the Dev. to keep up the good work. It's not entirely impossible to catch up to FS.

Rated 50/50 by RWW at Feb 19, 2008

Nice little viewer. I'm a solid Irfanview user but after ninjeratu I might have to try it to spite him.

Rated 50/50 by bekaye at Feb 20, 2008

Nice! Little! Can't argue with that.

Rated 40/50 by radiomaffia at Apr 30, 2008

Using ACDSee 3.1 still and FastStone Image Viewer, but this viewer will certainly can become my favorites! Thankyou for beiing freeware

Rated 40/50 by bobad at Feb 26, 2009

Getting better and a little more usable. The controls are a bit more intuitive. Still far from Faststone quality and usability. I can't help but wonder why developers feel they must include a browser (pictured above in the screen shot) when Windows already has a great one. Explorer already has thumbnails, browsing, sorting, comments, EXIF, sizing, and everything needed. A picture viewer only needs to have full screen viewing and light editing, and not duplicate the Explorer. Anyway, I've grudgingly upped my rating to 4 stars... 3.6 actually.

Rated 30/50 by graphicequaliser at Mar 25, 2009

"Not bad but a bit fiddly" Fast, smoothed zoom in to avoid blockiness. Not easy to go from browsing a directory of images to viewing/editing individual images. Fastone is a better viewer IMO. This is good, but not as good.

Rated 10/50 by dennismorgan13 at May 18, 2009

"Apparently useless" None that you don't get from other programmes Nothing to report, just nothing Not worth the time and effort downloading

Rated 20/50 by donatello77 at Jul 29, 2009

"Nothing special" It

Rated 40/50 by Balderstrom at Sep 3, 2009

Except xNview Full is 15.5MB ... Unlike some I'll actually use a program before bothering to write a review. This is a decent Multi-App, with 4 separate Binaries plus the Profile switcher. Which lets you work with the Editor or Slideshow or Search separately (if desired) from the main viewer. Unfortunately, the search is slow the "Filters" don't make much sense (if they even work at all) and it doesn't support regex or pcre. The Editor is interesting, but is missing a few things like: [x] autoFit to window. Everytime you resize an image's window you need to manually reZoom. [-] The Create Icon is interesting and incomplete. If you've rezoomed a window (but not resized) The Create Icon, annoyingly, autoMaximizes the window again. Also it only lets you choose one icon size. Lots of options for the Viewer itself, only missing a few things in this area: 1) Font Settings for Thumb Details, and Font Settings for FullScreen Mode. 2A) Option to 1) use XPs thumbNail cache or other formats. 2B) Option to save WildBit's ThumbNail.dat cache to ApplicationData instead of per folder. Needs an option for ToolBars IconOnly (with tooltip) or Icon+Text Most of the windows can't be resized below a certain point, which is somewhat of an annoyance. Wildbit does NOT hose your system extension settings. Which is a major plus in my books. It will leave them completely alone if thats what you want. Looks promising if development continues.

Rated 10/50 by emanresU deriseD at Nov 5, 2009

It took me literally 1 minute after installing this slow, clunky, crappy thing to say out loud "Get this $#@!%& thing off my computer!" XnView.

Rated 20/50 by Brent212 at Jan 16, 2010

Didn't waste time finding any pros since the cons were immediately apparent and made it clear I could never use this program. Incredibly small amount of configuration settings Can't scroll other than by dragging the scroll bars (who does that?) Can't paste a copied selection from one image into another in any useful way. The scroll wheel on my mouse controls the zoom, while I'd rather it move the image up and down (scroll). Should be a setting for this, in case anyone actually wants to use it for zooming (if the programmers knew what they were doing, they'd make it zoom when the control or shift key was held down, which is what I'm pretty sure Photoshop does). If you have two images open, and you select a small square in one image and copy it, you should be able to switch to the other image and paste that square into the image, and then be able to drag it around to place it wherever you want. However, when you paste it into the other image, the copied square gets pasted into the center, but the entre image around it gets erased. WEAK. You can draw a square in the second image, and then when you paste it will just fill up the square, but then it'll be resized and the proportions are likely to be off, unless you somehow figure out how to draw a square of the exact pixel dimensions that the selection was. Crazy. One of the most common things I use an image utility like this for is to save screen captures, many of which are of web pages (like receipts) or diagrams (for work) that take up more than one screen. I need to be able to create a big blank image, paste the screen shot into it and scroll down and paste the next screen shot into the same image. No way to do that with this program, as far as I can tell. Plus, the inability to scroll with the arrow keys, page up/down keys, or scroll wheel is ridiculous.

Rated 50/50 by Rectech at Nov 5, 2010

Menu items are intuitive. I was able to open graphics, update or polish them and then close the program without a great deal of lag. Nothing and your rating system stinks.

Rated 20/50 by Hilbert at Dec 6, 2010

This viewer is getting better but it is still extraordinarily slow in generating its default-size thumbnails from large TIF files (100-600MB each). A directory of these large TIFs (50 or 100 or so) will bring WildBit Viewer to its knees. The worst aspect of this viewer is its terrible ergonomics, specifically one's inability to select a part of an image with the mouse and have that part instantly fill the screen (a la IrfanView or Hamrick's now-obsolete ViewPrint Pro but which does it to perfection*). Today, any serious photographer will have many huge TIFs on his PC, thus it's just a fact that he'll need to zoom in on sections of an image within a split-second, so Viewers that do not support such features are essentially useless. One really has to wonder if this developer actually uses WildBit Viewer outside his selection of small-size test images. ------------- * Produce a square or rectangle anywhere within the image with a mouse and immediately the mouse button is released the square/rectangle optimally fills the screen. Repeat this again or zoom in and out with the + & - keys. IrfanView is not quite as good ergonomically in that the selected square must be clicked before the image expands.

Rated 40/50 by berliner6 at Dec 31, 2010

If you point to a folder that has a lot of subfolders and click on Slideshow and random, it will give you a random slideshow through *all* of the subfolders. This is the only viewer I know that can do this. The interface is clunky and not particularly intuitive.