View, edit and manage RAW images with Photo Browser

RAW image formats may have been around for a very long time (Adobe’s DNG is 10 years old this month), but they’re still not widely supported. Most graphics software handles one or two file types at best, or ignores them entirely.

Photo Browser is a little more ambitious. Once a commercial product, now freeware, this capable image viewer supports the popular RAW file types DNG, CRW, CR2, RAW, NEF, PEF, RAF, SRF, SR2 and ARW files, as well as the usual JPG/ GIF/ PNG/ TIFF and others.

Whatever you’re browsing, the program hides its own interface to give you the maximum possible viewing area. There are no toolbars here, no ribbons, menus or anything else: just a resizeable viewing window which you can browse with hotkeys or forward/ back/ play buttons.

Despite the apparent simplicity, useful extras aren't far away. Hover a mouse cursor over the window and an “always on top” toggle appears top-right. And pressing M displays a round magnifier which zooms in on a particular area by spinning the mouse wheel, while the rest of the image remains at its original size.

There’s a built-in thumbnail browser, of course -- and this also delivers much more than we expected. Thumbnails are created using bicubic resizing, then sharpened for excellent image quality. They’re available in sizes from 32 to 256 pixels. And indexing via Microsoft SQL Server CE means you get great performance.

Editing options are relatively basic, with single sliders to tweak brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation and sharpness. But there are better crop, tilt and resize tools, with for example a simple box you can click, drag and resize to define your crop areas.

The thumbnail browser’s "Extras" menu contains the three remaining major features, including batch (text) watermarking and resizing tools, an image renamer, and the option to create PDF thumbnails of your selected photos.

Photo Browser wasn't the best commercial image viewer, and it's not a leading freeware package, either. But good RAW support, strong thumbnailing and its PDF contact sheets are highlights, text watermarking also works well, and if these are top priorities for you then it’s worth a closer look.