Pixea 4+

Full-Screen Perfection

This photo-viewer is by far the best in the biz. I thoroughly enjoy viewing photos with it. I tried a couple of others out, but this one is exactly what I was looking for. There is no dead space or any extra design baggage when viewing photos. Pixea knocks it out of the park keeping the design minimalistic while ensuring the functionality is through the roof

So far, mostly good

In a graphics viewer, I like a minimal interface with no distractions. I also prefer to see my images in their actual size, with the exception of images that are of a higher resolution than my display, in which case they should be resized to fit automatically.

Pixea gets closer to this than most. The interface is minimal indeed with borderless windows, but where it fails for me is primarily the on-screen controls that pop up whenever my move my mouse. It's unnecessary if you know the keyboard commands already and there should be an option to not have that appear.

I'm also not a fan of havng the window "close/minimize/zoom" buttons overlaid on my images when displayed. I know they hide "eventually", but I would actually rather just have a border on top than have those buttons overlaid onto my photos.

The last gripe I have is with the fitting of my images to the window. Generally speaking, I want to see them in their actual size, with over-sized ones reduced to fit. Pixea doesn't do this. If you have it set to "Actual Size", then images that exceed my display dimensions are not completely visible.

Other than this, Pixea is great. The controls are intuitive and other than my caveats above, is generally unobtrusive. Rendering can be a bit laggy compared to another viewer I've long used when panning through a folder of images, but iits rendering quality seems pretty good otherwise.

App Will Sometimes Corrupt Your Photos

I thought at first it was my harddrive but systematically across both Intel and M! chip laptops (2019 and 2022 respectively), on both local and external harddrives (both disk and SSD) the Pixea app will randomly corrupt your photos.
...
It wasn't always this way and it happens predicably 100% of the time if you tell Pixea to stretch your images to fit or to fill screen in slideshow mode. This seems isolated to the latest update of the app. So I'd say buyer beware.
...
It should be noted that I did check my original source photos both in Photoshop, Adobe Bridge and Lightroom just to make sure the source images were intact. Always it was only after being previewed (even while the slideshow is running) that Pixea would corrupt my photos.

Developer Response ,

Pixea is not able to corrupt photos or files, as it requests read-only access when viewing images.