QuickView

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🚀 Introduction

QuickView is currently one of the fastest image viewers available on the Windows platform. We focus purely on delivering the ultimate viewing experience—leave the heavy editing to professional tools like Photoshop.

Rewritten from scratch using Direct2D and C++23, QuickView abandons legacy GDI rendering for a game-grade visual architecture. With a startup speed and rendering performance that rivals or exceeds closed-source commercial software, it is designed to handle everything from tiny icons to massive 8K RAW photos with zero latency.

🌐 Multi-Language Support: English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, Deutsch, Español, Русский

📂 Supported Formats

QuickView supports almost all modern and professional image formats:

• Classic: JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIF, TIFF, ICO
• Web/Modern: WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, SVG, SVGZ, JXL
• Pro/HDR: EXR, HDR, PIC, PSD, TGA, PCX, QOI, WBMP, PAM, PBM, PGM, PPM, WDP, HDP
• RAW (LibRaw): ARW, CR2, CR3, DNG, NEF, ORF, RAF, RW2, SRW, X3F, MRW, MOS, KDC, DCR, SR2, PEF, ERF, 3FR, MEF, NRW, RAW

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QuickView v6.8.0 - Dynamic Island, Filmstrip Gallery & Custom Hotkeys

Release Date: 2026-06-14

💡 Tip: Press F1 at any time to open the interactive Shortcut & Help overlay to review all commands and operations.

🏝️ Floating ‘Dynamic Island’ Window Controls

• Capsule Design: Replaced window controls with a floating top-right capsule widget featuring soft hover glow effects.
• Maximized Viewport: Compact caption buttons maximize display area for image content.

🎞️ Top-Hover Filmstrip Gallery

• Trigger Options: Configurable gallery visibility (Hover, Pinned, or Disabled) via dropdown settings.
• Center-Align Scroll: Selected thumbnails trigger a smooth scrolling animation to align the item to the viewport center.

📺 Picasa Spotlight Slideshow

• Dual Modes: Supported standard fullscreen slideshow and a new Spotlight mode (dims background to focus on active image).

⌨️ Custom Keyboard Mapping

• Custom Hotkeys: Fully customizable hotkeys support. Users can rebind all core actions and navigation shortcuts directly in the Settings menu.

⚡ Binary Footprint Optimization

• Stream Elimination: Removed <iostream> dependency, saving ~18.5 KB.
• Localization Compression: Deduplicated translation templates, saving ~10.5 KB.
• Icon Coordinates: Compressed vector coordinate data to 16-bit integers, saving 54 KB.
• Zero Overhead Callbacks: Devirtualized controllers and replaced std::function with C-style function pointers.

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✨ Key Features

1. 🏎️ Extreme Performance & Architecture

• Google Highway SIMD: Dynamic dispatching for SSE4, AVX2, AVX-512, and ARM64 NEON.
• Titan Tiling System: Handle gigapixel images with smooth 60fps panning by only decoding what’s visible.
• Zero-Latency JXL (#137): Native JPEG XL support with optimized thread pooling and memory management.

“Speed is a feature.”

QuickView leverages Multi-Threaded Decoding for modern formats like JXL and AVIF, delivering up to 6x faster load times on 8-core CPUs compared to standard viewers.

• Zero-Latency Preview: Smart extraction for massive RAW (ARW, CR2) and PSD files.
• Debug HUD: Press F12 to see real-time performance metrics (Decode time, Render time, Memory usage). (First time use: Please enable Debug Mode in Settings > Advanced)
  

2. 🎛️ Visual Control & Themes

Customize your personal viewing experience.

A fully hardware-accelerated Settings Dashboard.

• Granular Control: Tweak mouse behaviors (Pan vs. Drag), zoom sensitivity, and loop rules.
• Custom Hotkeys: Fully customizable hotkeys support. Map and rebind core actions and shortcuts directly in Settings.
• Personalized Themes: Dark, Light, and System-Sync UI modes with granular control over Accent Colors.
• Ambient Dimmer: Configurable dimming overlay that darkens the background when menus or galleries are active.
• Portable Mode: One-click toggle to switch config storage between AppData (System) and Program Folder (USB Stick).

3. 🔄 Seamless Updates

Stay fresh, stay fast.

QuickView automatically checks for updates in the background. When a new version is available, a non-intrusive toast notification will appear. You can install the update with a single click—no browser needed.

4. 📊 Geek Visualization

Don’t just view the image; understand the data.

• Real-time RGB Histogram: Translucent waveform overlay.
• Refactored Metadata Architecture: Faster and more accurate EXIF/Metadata parsing.
• HUD Photo Wall: Press T to summon a high-performance gallery overlay capable of virtualizing 10,000+ images.
• Smart Extension Fix: Automatically detect and repair incorrect file headers (e.g., PNG saved as JPG).
• Instant RAW Dev: One-click toggle between “Fast Preview” and “Full Quality” decoding for RAW files.
• Deep Color Analysis: Real-time display of Color Space (sRGB/P3/Rec.2020), Color Mode (YCC/RGB), and Quality Factor.

5. 🔍 Visual Comparison Excellence

“Compare with absolute precision.”

QuickView features a powerful Dual-View Compare Mode built for deep visual analysis.

• Side-by-Side Sync: Synchronized zoom, pan, and rotation between two images, allowing for millimetric inspection.
• Precision HUD: Real-time RGB Envelope Histograms and quality metrics (Entropy/Sharpness) to identify the superior shot.
• Interactive Divider: A smart, translucent divider that identifies the ‘winner’ of each comparison metric automatically.
  
  

6. 🌈 HDR & Color Mastery

“View light as it was meant to be seen.”

QuickView 5.0 introduces a world-class color management suite.

• True HDR Panel: SIMD-accelerated peak luminance estimation and “HDR Pro” structural metadata (MaxCLL/FALL).
• Global Soft Proofing: Instantly preview how your photos will look when printed or converted to specialized color spaces.
• Linear workflow: 32-bit internal pipeline ensures zero banding and absolute precision.

7. 📚 Comic Mode & Zero-Overhead VFS

Virtual archive browsing with zero disk impact.

Integrated lightweight unrar-mini memory engine and a high-performance Data-Oriented Design (DOD) Virtual File System (VFS).

• Zero-Unpack Memory Stream: Scan and read .zip, .rar, .cbz, and .cbr archives directly in memory. Protects SSD lifespan.
• Comic Dual Page Mode: Stitches adjacent pages side-by-side with smart dynamic scaling, providing an immersive double-page comic book experience.

8. 🎬 Full Animation Support & Dirty Rect

Engineered for players, designers, and developers.

• Universal Playback: High-performance playback for .gif, .webp, .apng, and .avifs animation formats.
• Frame Inspector: Traverse animations frame-by-frame with Alt + Left/Right controls.
• Dirty Rect Visualizer: Real-time highlight boxes outlining the exact canvas regions decoded and refreshed by the GPU.

9. 📐 Tracing Mode & Mouse Click-Through

Specially tailored for digital artists and animators.

• Tracing Overlay (Tracing Mode): Highly customizable semi-transparent window using DirectComposition with dynamic opacity adjustment shortcuts.
• Mouse Click-Through: Pass mouse interactions straight to background drawing software (WM_EX_TRANSPARENT) while overlaying reference images.

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⚙️ The Engine Room

We don’t use generic codecs. We use the State-of-the-Art libraries for each format.

Format	Backend Engine	Why it rocks (Architecture)
JPEG	libjpeg-turbo v3	AVX2 SIMD. The absolute king of decompression speed.
PNG / QOI	Google Wuffs	Memory-safe. Outperforms libpng, handles massive dimensions.
JXL	libjxl + threads	Parallelized. Instant decoding for high-res JPEG XL.
AVIF	dav1d + threads	Assembly-optimized AV1 decoding.
SVG	Direct2D Native	Hardware Accelerated. Infinite lossless scaling.
RAW	LibRaw	Optimized for “Instant Preview” extraction.
EXR	TinyEXR	Lightweight, industrial-grade OpenEXR support.
HEIC / TIFF	Windows WIC	Hardware accelerated (Requires system extensions).

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⌨️ Shortcuts & Help

Press F1 at any time to view the interactive Shortcut Guide.

🗺️ Roadmap We are constantly evolving. Here is what’s currently in development:

• Tracing Mode: Semi-transparent overlay mode, designed for designers to reference and trace over other windows.
• Video Wall Port: Direct output to multi-monitor visual arrays.
• Plugin System: Open architecture for community-developed codecs and filters.

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💻 System Requirements

Component	Minimum Requirement	Notes
OS	Windows 10 (1511+)	DirectComposition Visual3 required
CPU	SSE4-Capable CPU	Broadened Support (Intel 2008+ / AMD 2011+)
Arch	x64 or ARM64	Native ARM64 support for NEON

⚠️ Important: QuickView uses Google Highway for dynamic SIMD dispatching. While we’ve broadened support to SSE4, ARM64 users enjoy full NEON acceleration.

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📥 Installation

QuickView is primarily designed as a Green & Portable application.

🍃 Recommended: Portable Mode

1. Download the QuickView_*.zip package from Releases.
2. Unzip anywhere and run QuickView.exe.
3. Use in-app Settings > Portable Mode to manage configuration storage.

📦 Installer & WinGet

If you prefer a standard Windows installation (includes a deep uninstallation tool):

• Manual: Download the QuickView_Installer_*.exe from Releases.
• Command Line:

  winget install justnullname.QuickView
  

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🛠️ Build from Source

⚠️ Architecture Note: The project has fully migrated to a CMake + Ninja + vcpkg build system. It uses the Clang-cl compiler and Full LTO (Link-Time Optimization) to achieve extreme binary size compression. The legacy .sln and .vcxproj files have been deprecated and removed.

Prerequisites

1. Visual Studio 2022 (with the “Desktop development with C++” workload installed) — provides the Windows SDK and the MSVC libraries that the Clang-cl toolchain links against.
2. LLVM / Clang Toolchain (Ensure clang-cl.exe and lld-link.exe are added to your system’s PATH; the LLVM bundled with VS under <VS>\VC\Tools\Llvm\x64\bin is detected automatically as well. For any other location, set the LLVM_INSTALL_DIR environment variable to the LLVM root, e.g. D:\dev\lang\clang).
3. CMake (3.25+) and Ninja (Bundled with VS or installed separately).
4. Git.

1. Clone with Submodules

Dependencies such as vcpkg, wuffs and unrar-mini are Git submodules and are required for the build:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/justnullname/QuickView.git

If the repository was cloned without --recursive, fetch them afterwards:

git submodule update --init --recursive

2. Bootstrap vcpkg (One Time)

.\third_party\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

3. Configure & Build

Run the following two commands in the root directory:

# 1. Restore the dependencies via vcpkg and configure the Release-LTO build matrix
cmake --preset Release-LTO -DVCPKG_MANIFEST_INSTALL=ON

# 2. Launch the Ninja backend for multi-core compilation and LTO linking
cmake --build out/build/Release-LTO

Why the extra flag? The presets deliberately pin VCPKG_MANIFEST_INSTALL to OFF so that re-configuring an already set-up tree stays fast and never hangs on a vcpkg install. The packages therefore have to be restored explicitly on the first configure, which is what -DVCPKG_MANIFEST_INSTALL=ON does; afterwards the plain cmake --preset Release-LTO is enough. Add the flag back whenever vcpkg.json changes.

The first configure builds every dependency from source (libjxl, libavif, LibRaw, …), so it takes a while; later configures reuse the vcpkg binary cache. Everything is installed into out/build/Release-LTO/vcpkg_installed.

The final executable will be located at out/build/Release-LTO/QuickView.exe.

Other presets: Debug-ASan (AddressSanitizer, no LTO) and ARM64-Release-LTO (ARM64 + Full LTO). The build directory always matches the preset name, e.g. out/build/Debug-ASan.

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⚖️ Credits

QuickView stands on the shoulders of giants. Licensed under GPL-3.0. Special thanks to David Kleiner (original JPEGView) and the maintainers of LibRaw, Google Wuffs, dav1d, and libjxl.