Re: Photos (Jpg, Png-viewer) --- i don't like it because it launches sluggishly...

Antonio Marques <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote:

J. J. Lodder <nospam@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:

Antonio Marques <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote:
 

Rich Ulrich <rich.ulrich@comcast.net> wrote:

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024 21:47:38 -0600, Tilde <invalide@invalid.invalid>
wrote:
 

Tony Cooper wrote:

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:19:17 -0700, HenHanna <HenHanna@devnull.tb>

There is a  (Windows) tool called  Photos (Jpg, Png-viewer)  --- i
don't like it because it launches  sluggishly....
 
Esp. in the last 5 days or so, i'm noticing that almost every day
i have to go to Properties to  change it back to
my fav. Jpg, Png-viewer tool
 
because the Windows update (?) is  pushing  Photos  on me.
 
is there a Fix for this???

 
I have thousands of images from .jpgs to .pngs on my computer.  I use
the (free) FastStone Photo Viewer.  It's not only a great image
viewer, but offers many other options from selecting by tagged images
to bulk re-naming.  It's set as my default viewer.
 
https://www.faststone.org/

 
https://www.irfanview.com/

 
I have both Faststone and Irfanview, and I like Faststone better.
 
What I remember last using Irfanview for was when I wanted
to change the default orientation of some pictures that were
usually wrong (downloaded from my off-brand phone).
 
IIRC, Faststone would rotate them okay for PC display by Faststone,
but they would be wrong when uploaded to Face Book.

 
Opening and saving a lossy format like jpg will usually result in... loss
of quality.

 
That's ancient folklore, from the times when 640x480 was a big image.
It may get noticable, but only when you order a huge reduction
in file size,

 
....no, it's the logical and unavoidable result of applying a lossy
encoding, all the more since the jpeg algorithm won't be the exact same
every time, and will throw out slightly different parts of the signal. It
will obviously be worse the lower the resolution is to begin with, but
that's a different issue.

You are merely regurgitating theory.
Have you ever tried to have a look at it?
'Everybody' knows that jpeg is not lossless, and therefore -BAD-.
Few people ask themselves: -what is it- that is being 'lost'.
(and is that good or bad)

In many cases the loss of so called 'information'
is actually a good thing.
There is 'information' and 'information'. [1]
In reducing RAW data to best quality jpeg,
what the jpeg keeps in mostly actual, real, image information. [2]
What jpeg 'loses' is mostly noise, such as sensor noise
and quantisation noise.

Apart from that there is usually a huge amount of redundancy
in an image that encodes each pixel separately,
with for example 14 bits/pixel.
Typical example: the blue sky may take up half the magabytes
of your raw sensor data.
Almost all the 'information' in those bits is redundant,
and most of what isn't redundant is noise.
Reducing the redundancy (and averaging the noise)
doesn't involve any real loss of image quality. [3]

Jan

[1] Remember that is picture which consists of nothing but noise
contains the most 'information' of all, in the informational sense
of 'information'.
[2] Yes, I know, there are obvious exceptions,
such as when your camera has a stuck pixel.
[3] Extreme example: consider an image that is uniformly medium grey.
Jpeg will reduce the 'information content' in the form of file size
by 99.99999%, to just a few bytes, with no loss at all
of picture content.
The moral: it isn't as simple as you seem to think it is.