Xnview Review 2015 ((new)) -

You could adjust colors, levels, and apply red-eye reduction, but all were destructive (saved over the original or created a new file). No history panel, no adjustment layers. For serious edits, you still launched Photoshop or GIMP.

By 2015, Picasa had excellent face recognition and Google Maps integration. XnView had none of that. Its "category" tagging was manual and clunky. xnview review 2015

Unlike Picasa (which scanned everything into a massive SQLite DB) or Windows Live Photo Gallery, XnView worked on a browser-based system. You navigated folders, it cached thumbnails ( .db files), but never forced you to "import" anything. This made it ideal for external drives and network shares. You could adjust colors, levels, and apply red-eye

The batch convert dialog was a beast. You could resize, add watermarks, change color depth, apply filters (sharpen, blur, emboss), and rename with regex-like patterns—all in one queue. No other free tool in 2015 offered this much control without a script. By 2015, Picasa had excellent face recognition and

While it supported RAW, decoding a 24MP Canon CR2 file took ~4-5 seconds on a 2015 mid-range PC, and the preview quality was mediocre (lots of noise, poor highlight recovery). Lightroom was far superior, but also $10/month.