A fast image viewer: vw Image Viewer View, sort and catalog thousands of images on Linux and Windows

It starts instantly and never keeps you waiting, even in folders of thousands of images. 16-bit data stays intact, and ZIP / 7z archives open in place. Tags and catalogs live in separate files, so your image files are never touched.

⬇ Download for Windows ⬇ Linux (x86_64) Source on GitHub

Latest: see Releases · Free and open source (MIT / Apache-2.0)

The vw window: folder tree on the left, image slots in the middle, metadata on the right, log at the bottom

What each format gets

Formats carry different information, so what vw can do differs a little from format to format.

Format	Specific to the format
JPEG	Shown the right way up from EXIF orientation, with camera, lens and exposure info. Photos with GPS appear on the map, and the shooting info is searchable
Camera RAW	The camera's embedded preview shows at once, then the sensor data is developed in the background and swapped in. Pairs with the JPEG of the same name for comparison, and `vwbatch` develops and exports in bulk
FITS (astronomy)	Dark images are stretched (zscale, asinh and more) with a color map and gauge. Darks and flats are applied, the sky chart shows where the image points, and 2–3 grayscale images are aligned and composed into color. Finishing nodes (stretch, noise reduction, deconvolution, star removal and more) are available, and every header keyword is searchable
PNG	16-bit images stay 16-bit, so you measure the real values, and a 10-bit or 12-bit monitor shows them with that gradation. Text chunks (creating software, descriptions and so on) appear as metadata and are searchable
WebP / GIF	All frames of an animation go into one slot and play at the speed written in the file. The wheel steps one frame at a time
TIFF	Multi-page files go into one slot and the wheel turns the pages. 32-bit float, CMYK and fax compression are read too. EXIF and tags are searchable
BMP	Old 1–32 bit BMPs and RLE compression open too
ZIP / 7z / tar	Open like a folder without extracting by hand (password-protected too). Images inside go into the search catalog and can be extracted when found

For every format: sort, then find

JPEG, RAW, FITS or an image inside a ZIP: sorting and searching work the same way.

🏷️

Sort

Flag images good or bad and add your own tags with a single key, then filter, copy the matches to another folder or export CSV / JSONL. AI adds content tags and names faces, and similar images such as RAW and JPEG pairs are grouped and compared.

🔍

Find

Register a folder as a dataset and vw builds a search catalog of shooting info, text, headers and AI tags, even inside ZIPs. Search by content, such as "ISO 800 or more", and extract the hits. Find photos by place on the map and astronomy images on the sky chart.

🖼️

View and measure

Compare many images side by side, run a slideshow, and see new images as they land in the folder. Measure pixel values, ROIs, histograms and quality metrics, inspect and change the pixel pipeline, and apply it to many files at once.

Fast: images decode in parallel in the background and are drawn by the GPU
No loss: 16-bit images are loaded as 16-bit, and pixel values, measurements and exports keep the full depth. On a 10-bit or 12-bit monitor the screen shows that gradation too
Never writes to your images: tags and catalogs are stored in separate files
AI stays on your PC: the tagging and face models run on the CPU and never send images out
English and Japanese UI: follows the OS language at first
Free and open source: dual-licensed MIT / Apache-2.0

Supported formats in detail

Format	Notes
PNG	1–16 bit, gray / RGB / alpha / palette
JPEG	Baseline / progressive, gray / color / CMYK
WebP	Lossy / lossless, transparency, animation
GIF	Transparency, animation
BMP	1–32 bit, palette / RLE / bit fields, top-down files too
TIFF	1–16 bit integer and 32-bit float, gray / RGB / alpha / palette / CMYK, CCITT G3 / G4, LZW / Deflate / PackBits / JPEG compression, tiles, BigTIFF, multi-page
Camera RAW	Nikon NEF / NRW, Sony ARW / SR2 / SRF, Fujifilm RAF (Canon CR2 / CR3 and DNG too)
FITS	`.fits` `.fit` `.fts`, tile-compressed `.fz`, `.fits.gz`. 8–64 bit integer and float, cubes, Bayer color
ZIP / 7z / tar	Password-protected (ZipCrypto and AES for ZIP, AES for 7z); tar plain, gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd; comic `.cbz` `.cb7` `.cbt`

Download

Get the file for your OS from the Releases page.

File	For
`vw-windows-x64.zip`	Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit)
`vw-linux-x64.tar.gz`	x86_64 Linux such as Ubuntu 22.04 or later

Releases come in two kinds: vX.Y.Z (stable, use this normally) and main-latest (the development build, replaced automatically on every change).

Install

Windows

There is no installer. Just unpack the zip.

Download vw-windows-x64.zip
Right-click the zip → Extract All into a folder of your choice (say, C:\Tools\vw)
Double-click vw.exe in that folder

If Chrome blocks the download as "not commonly downloaded", open chrome://downloads and press Keep on the vw row. If Windows shows "Windows protected your PC" on first start, choose More info → Run anyway. Both appear because vw is not code-signed yet.

On Windows 11 PCs with Smart App Control on, vw is blocked with no Run anyway button. Use the Microsoft Store version (in review), or turn it off in Windows Security → App & browser control → Smart App Control settings. On some Windows versions it cannot be turned back on without reinstalling Windows. Turning it off also weakens protection against other apps, so do so at your own risk.

To uninstall, delete the folder and %APPDATA%\vw. The registry is not used.

Ubuntu

tar xzf vw-linux-x64.tar.gz
cd vw
./install.sh

install.sh puts vw in ~/.local/bin and adds it to the app list (no root needed). You can also run ./vw from the unpacked folder without installing.

If it does not start on a server or minimal install:

sudo apt install libxkbcommon-x11-0 libgl1 libegl1 \
  libxcursor1 libxrandr2 libxi6 fonts-noto-cjk

Uninstall with ./install.sh --uninstall.