Image Viewer better then ACDSee Classic 2.43?

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Hi all,

I am looking for a general purpose image viewer that would level up, or surpass ACDSee Classic 2.43 in 2 categories. Speed of opening full screen JPG images, and use of very little resources while doing so.

For reference, I am using a OSX 10.8.4 on Macbook Pro from 2010 with 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo and 8GB of ram.

On occasion I need to review hundreds of photos and select the once I like out of them. I am sure many professional photographers know what I am talking about. In any case, for this task all I need is a program that can quickly (as quickly as possible) flip through hundreds of images. I have tried the following programs, all of which are too slow, and use way too much CPU (thus making computer hot).

  1. Preview
  2. Finder
  3. Xee
  4. Sequential
  5. Lyn
  6. Lightroom
  7. Bridge
  8. XnViewMP
  9. ACDSee Pro 3 Mac

And all of the above I find too slow, except for XnView, which works fast enough but uses 100% of the CPU consistently while flipping through pictures.

I am comparing all these to my 13 year old copy of ACDSee Classic 2.43 running under Wine on the same mac. It is consistently at least 2x as fast as any of the above programs while loading my CPU to only about 30% at worse, and consuming very little resources otherwise.

What gives? To be honest, I am switching from a Windows environment. Under windows I never had the need to find anything faster or better then ACDSee 2.43. Searching what modern windows have to offer, they all come short too. Any photographers there with any suggestions or ideas?
 
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Have you tried picasa
 
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I was a big fan of ACDSee Classic when I was a Windows user, and personally I've found Xee to be the best replacement for it on OS X. It seems very odd that you are having that much of an issue with it. Have you tried the commercial version, Xee³? It has some improvements, particularly in JPEG rendering (the free version is off with the colors for some reason). The only other one I can recommend is ViewIt. This is the only one I liked when I first switched to OS X before Xee came along.
 
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I tried Picasa as well, it's not bad, I like using it for organizing photos, etc. But it's not quite what I am looking for, in terms of just an image viewer, and it's still not quite fast enough. I also used Xee3, it's not bad, but again, if I want to look through photos as quickly as possible, in a period of 10 seconds I can get through fully loading 23 pictures with ACDSee Classic, while Xee3 loads only 14 in the same time, and the CPU load during the entire 10 seconds is at 100% for Xee3 while only about 30% for ACDSee.

I realize that it's a little silly to want to look at that many photos so fast. I personally need it for scientific research, so I would be going through maybe 500 images before I find one I need, and I do not need more then a glance to know if the image works for me or not.

I'll give ViewIt a try, will post results.
 
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Thank you for the recommendation! ViewIt does the trick. Still not quite as fast as ACDSee, but nearly the same. And it has a lot of nice features which ACDSee lacked due to it's age. So that's my new viewer of choice :)
 
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I have an idea for you to try in case this helps. Select Finder, then go to View, Show View Options, and deselect the option to Show Icon Preview. Then click "Use as defaults" to make it stick across all folders. Once done, try paging through a stack of images. I'm curious to see if that feature is impacting the performance of other apps.
 
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I tried the Show Icon Preview method, and I am getting roughly the same results, 12-13 images in 10 seconds. But I am pretty happy with the ViewIt. It gets me the same 23-24 images in 10 seconds, so basically just as good as ACDSee. Also uses 50%-60% CPU while going at full speed, so not bad at all. Thanks for the recommendation again.
 
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I tried the Show Icon Preview method, and I am getting roughly the same results, 12-13 images in 10 seconds. But I am pretty happy with the ViewIt. It gets me the same 23-24 images in 10 seconds, so basically just as good as ACDSee. Also uses 50%-60% CPU while going at full speed, so not bad at all. Thanks for the recommendation again.

You're welcome. ViewIt does a great job of caching in advance. I'm actually quite surprised that Xee hasn't caught up in that respect.. If you don't mind giving the developer some feedback on that based on your needs and experiences, perhaps it's something he can address in the future.
 

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