ViewIt

As it happens, I have a few (*cough*) manga scanlations laying around on CD-ROMs. These are usually in the form of a directory with a bunch of JPG files in it.  In order to read these volumes comfortably, an image viewer with certain capabilities is necessary.  On Windows, I used ACDSee, which allows me to view images full-screen, then press PgUp or PgDn to go to the previous/next image.

For the Mac, I have now finally found a program that has most of the features I need. It's called ViewIt (and it's shareware).  Some of the features I find very useful are:

  • Drag a folder to the ViewIt window to make the program "aware" of the folder; it will display the first image found.
  • Use ⌘1 to display the image at its original size (100%).  This is important because fitting the image to the screen width often renders the smaller text unreadable.
  • Use ⌘F to display the image full-screen (rather than in a window).  I've found that quite a few image viewers don't support this feature and the previous one *at the same time*. That is, you can view the image at 100% in a window, or cropped full-size.  Fortunately, ViewIt supports both.
  • The above means that most images will be larger than the screen, so the ability to scroll (especially up and down) is crucial.  In ViewIt, this is done with Ctrl+cursor.
  • Cursor left and right goes to the next/previous image.

All these features sound simple, but they're almost mandatory for reading scanlations in a pleasant manner, yet rarely do image viewer support all of them. At least, that is my experience. A while ago, I tested quite a few, and found all of them lacking in one way or another. :-(

(Of course, if you happen to know about another image viewer for OS X that does all the above, I'd like to hear about it. ^_^)

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