Xee: Image Viewing at Its Finest
We previously reviewed The Unarchiver, a free replacement for the built-in archive manager inside OS X that could handle anything thrown at it in a much cleaner, light-weight manner. The same guys who made that great app put that same philosophy into an image viewer. The result? Xee - a free, lightweight, easy-to-use app that is designed to easily give the user plenty of options in a slim, no frills interface. So is it worthy of replacing Preview as your default image viewer?
Xee can read just about any image format you can think of, including any image format Preview can view and then some; including PCX, Maya IFF and Amiga IFF-ILBM. Xee can also “losslessy” rotate and crop JPEG images. With some other apps—including Preview—when an image is rotated and saved it is re-compressed, resulting in a loss of quality. This is a great feature for all of you hardcore photography junkies that don’t want to lose a single detail. For you keyboard wizards, Xee offers a plethora of keyboard shortcuts that make browsing, opening, and manipulating images much faster than just using your mouse.
One small detail of Xee that some people don’t enjoy is the default icon set that comes with the app. To fix this, we turn to Adam Betts for help. Adam has made a great set of replacement icons that make the program much better on the eyes. Click here for more on that.
Xee is a freeware app and can be downloaded from the Xee website.
How do I make Xee the default app for all kinds of image formats? I installed it and even though it does show up in the “Open with” context menu, all images still seem to be open in Preview by default.
Harish-
Select the image you wish to be opened by Xee. Press ‘ cmd - i ‘ and select the app- in this case Xee - to open all of that particular format. And all incompasing and time saving solution is to download RCDefaultApp ( http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/ ) which will allow you to do this on a larger scale.
@Kelly
Thanks a lot! RCDefaultApp is exactly what I was looking for. I knew how to use Get Info and Change All for a specific file-type.
Fast alright(if thats all you care for) but doesn’t honour colour profiles so anything and everything you watch in Xee looks a little desaturated. Bring up the same image in Preview and Xee and see how they both look.
that said Xee is still great but not worth making the default image viewing tool till the bug is fixed.
I am glad that Xee made it to macapper as well. I have chosen Xee for my Software for Switchers project on my blog also since it is an awesome software.
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