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XnView

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XnView Classic
Original authorPierre-Emmanuel Gougelet
DeveloperXnSoft
Initial release1.05 / 1998; 28 years ago (1998)[1]
Stable release
2.52.5 / 4 March 2026; 3 months ago (2026-03-04)[2]
Written inC, C++[3]
EngineGFL (Graphics File Library)[4]
Operating systemWindows
Platformx86
Size4 to 26 MB
Available in46 languages[5]
List of languages
Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh
Type
LicenseFreeware for private, educational or non-profit use; otherwise commercial software
Websitewww.xnview.com/en/xnview-classic/
XnView MP (Multi-Platform)
Original authorPierre-Emmanuel Gougelet
DeveloperXnSoft
Initial release0.26 / 17 September 2008; 17 years ago (2008-09-17)[6]
Stable release
1.11.2 / 30 April 2026; 44 days ago (2026-04-30)[7]
Written inC++ (Qt)
Operating systemWindows, Linux, macOS
Platformx86, x64, ARM64
Size53 to 114 MB
Available in28 languages[8]
List of languages
Armenian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Type
LicenseFreeware for private, educational or non-profit use; otherwise commercial software
Websitewww.xnview.com/en/xnview-mp/

XnView is an image viewer and organizer software used for viewing, converting, organizing and editing raster images, as well as general purpose file management. It comes with built-in hex inspection, batch renaming/converting, image scanning and screen capture tools.

It is licensed as freeware for private, educational and non-profit uses. For other uses, it is licensed as commercial software.

Editions

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XnView is actively distributed in two distinct branches, differentiated by their underlying architecture, platform compatibility, and plugin support:

XnView Classic

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  • Status: legacy version[9] that primarily receives maintenance updates.
  • Platform: Windows exclusively (requires Windows XP or later).
  • Architecture: built on the original 1998 codebase using the standard 32-bit Windows API.
  • Limitations: lacks native Unicode support, which can cause errors when reading file paths or metadata containing non-Latin characters.
  • Plugins: relies heavily on a library of 32-bit plugins and external .dll files to handle complex formats, archives, and additional tools.

XnView MP (Multi-Platform)

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  • Status: modern, actively developed version.
  • Platform: Windows, macOS, and Linux (requires a 64-bit system starting with version 1.6.0).
  • Architecture: rewritten from the ground up in C++ using the Qt framework.
  • Enhancements: resolves Classic's limitations by adding full native Unicode support, multi-core processor utilization (for faster rendering and caching), and modern 64-bit capability.
  • Plugins: requires 64-bit plugins. Many features that required external add-ons in Classic (like drawing tools and specialized format support) are natively integrated into MP's core engine.

Features

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XnView Classic and XnView MP share a largely similar core feature set, although several advanced capabilities are exclusive to XnView MP due to its more modern architecture (marked with an asterisk).[10]

Format support

  • Reading: supports over 500 image formats.[11]
  • Writing: supports exporting to over 70 image formats

Viewing and navigation

  • Thumbnail, fullscreen, and filmstrip image browsing
  • Slideshow creation with transition effects
  • Side-by-side comparison of up to four* images
  • Duplicate file finder
  • Advanced file search

Image editing

  • Image transformation: resizing, rotation, and cropping, including Lossless JPEG transformation
  • Color adjustment: brightness, contrast, gamma, auto-levels/contrast, and color depth/palette modification
  • Image filters and effects
  • Drawing tool for adding lines, circles, arrows, speech bubbles, and watermarks

Cataloging and Metadata support

  • Metadata and Thumbnails caching
  • EXIF, IPTC and XMP* metadata support
  • Embedded ICC color profile support
  • Albums* and Keyword Sets*
  • Face detection*

Batch processing

  • Batch renaming
  • Batch conversion[13]
  • Batch timestamp modification

Creation tools and Utilities

  • Contact sheet, image strip, and video thumbnail gallery generation
  • File listing and archives creation
  • Screen capture
  • Printing and TWAIN scanner support

Plugins support

Reception

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XnView has received five cows from Tucows.[14] In 2006 Sveriges Television (SVT) recommended XnView in their High Definition Multi Format Test Set.[15] Research papers about DICOM and digital watermarking used XnView for image processing.[16][17]

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The author published various other products using the classic or the multi-platform XnView code base, some examples are:

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "XnView Classic 1.05". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  2. ^ "XnView Classic 2.52.5". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  3. ^ "Programming Language". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  4. ^ a b "GFL SDK Software Development Kit Version 3.40". XnView.com. 2011. Archived from the original on 2017-07-20. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  5. ^ "Translators". XnView.com. 2010-04-27. Archived from the original on 2021-11-05. Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  6. ^ "XnView MP 0.26". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  7. ^ "XnView MP 1.11.2". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  8. ^ "Translations". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  9. ^ "XnView Downloads". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  10. ^ "XnView Features". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  11. ^ "Supported file formats". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  12. ^ "Can XnView play video files (MP4, MOV, AVI)?". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  13. ^ "How to resize images in batch without losing quality". XnView.com. Retrieved 2026-06-03.
  14. ^ Michael E, Callahan (2007-09-05). "Picks: Reviews of programs that convert graphics, work with audio files". Tucows. Archived from the original on 2015-05-14. Retrieved 2015-02-20.
  15. ^ Lars Haglund (February 2006). "The SVT High Definition Multi Format Test Set" (PDF). SVT. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2013-01-15. Retrieved 2014-02-23. For viewing the original 'sgi16' files we recommend the use of XnView
  16. ^ Edward J. Escott, David Rubinstein (September 2003). "Free DICOM Image Viewing and Processing Software for Your Desktop Computer: What's Available and What It Can Do for You". Radiographics. 23 (5). RSNA: 1341–1357. doi:10.1148/rg.235035047. PMID 12975521.
  17. ^ E Ganic, AM Eskicioglu (2004). Robust DWT-SVD domain image watermarking: embedding data in all frequencies. Proceedings of the 2004 workshop on Multimedia and security. ACM. pp. 166–174. ISBN 978-1-58113-854-2.
  18. ^ "XnView old Download". 2002-12-03. Archived from the original on 2017-01-01. Retrieved 2017-04-04. Nview/Nconvert & View2 v3.87
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