Choosing the background shade and settings in Image Viewer
Set the picture surround to white, light grey, dark grey or black, and choose how Image Viewer by Zaweba handles rotations, slideshows and deletes.
There is only a short Settings window in Image Viewer by Zaweba, and that is on purpose. A picture viewer should behave sensibly without being configured, so there are only a few choices, each of which changes something you will actually notice. This is a tour of them, and of when you might want to change each one.
The picture surround
The surround is the area around the picture when it does not fill the window. You can choose white, light grey, dark grey or black.
The shade changes how you see the picture more than you might expect. Bright surroundings make a photo look darker and flatter, and dark ones make it look brighter and punchier. For judging photos, many people prefer dark grey or black, which keep attention on the picture. For screenshots, documents and scans with white edges, white or light grey lets the page blend in rather than sitting in a black frame.
Full screen is always black, whatever you choose here. F11 or Enter goes full screen, and the black is there so nothing competes with the picture.
Saving rotations
When you turn a picture with R, or with Shift+R or L, Image Viewer asks once as you leave it whether to save the rotation. In Settings you can set this to Ask, Always or Never.
Ask is the safe default and suits most people. Always is handy when you are working through a shoot where every sideways picture should be fixed, because it saves a click per photo. Never suits you if you only ever rotate to look, for example when a picture is easier to read turned, and you don't want files changed at all.
Saving is careful either way. JPEGs whose size is a whole number of compression blocks are turned losslessly, other JPEGs are re-encoded at quality 95, and PNG, BMP, TIFF and still GIFs are re-encoded losslessly, with EXIF kept.
Slideshow interval
F5 starts a slideshow in full screen, moving on every 3 seconds by default. The interval is a setting. Shorter suits a quick review of a big folder; longer suits showing holiday photos to people who want to talk about each one. Space pauses whatever the interval.
Confirming deletes
Del sends a picture to the Recycle Bin, and by default a confirmation asks first. You can turn that off. With it off, weeding a large folder becomes one key per picture, and since the file still goes to the Recycle Bin you can restore it if you change your mind. Leave it on if you share the PC or are going through photos you can't replace.
What is remembered for you
Some things are not settings because the app simply remembers them. The window's position comes back where you left it, and recent files are kept for File, then Open recent. You do not have to save anything for this to happen.
Settings that live elsewhere
Making Image Viewer the default for pictures is also found in Settings, as Make Image Viewer the default for pictures. It registers the app for your user only, then opens Windows' Default apps page where you make the choice yourself; the app never changes the default on its own.
If you are setting the viewer up for someone else, a sensible starting point is a dark grey surround, rotations on Ask, deletes confirmed and a slow slideshow. That gives a calm, forgiving viewer that is hard to get wrong, and there is little else to configure.
