Long time no see! As I fairly explicitly noted in my previous post, Pictus development have been pretty much abandoned. If nothing else, no updates in four years should have been a good indicator! Despite this, Pictus is a lot more popular now compared to when I was actually developing it. I’m not entirely comfortable with supplying such an old version of Pictus, so that leaves me with either pulling the plug or putting some sort of effort into basic maintenance. I have decided to go for the latter.
Currently I’m not up for actually adding features but I’m quite willing to fix bugs. I have squished quite a few already in development, but I can only fix those I’ve run into myself (or have managed to identify during code inspection). I am dogfooding Pictus, but that will only uncover bugs for features and configurations I use. If you have run into any notable issues or bugs, send me an e-mail or post a comment below. I would also love it if you mentioned what you use Pictus for. According to analytics, most of you are only interested in getting PSD (Photoshop) thumbnails in Windows. I am considering to make a separate download that only contains the component needed for thumbnails, but explicitly hearing requests for this would make the decision slightly easier.
What is new in Pictus 1.1.5
The update I’m working will be released when I have fixed all known notable issues and when I am confident that it’s a notable improvement stability-wise. A very incomplete list of release highlights follow:
- BUGFIX: Everything looks blurry on high-DPI displays.
- BUGFIX: Pictus can appear on the wrong monitor when you enter fullscreen mode.
- BUGFIX: Installation can hang, resulting in a semi-installed state.
- BUGFIX: PSD images with multiple alpha channels don’t show up.
- BUGFIX: GIF animations stops playing after a few minutes.
- 64-bit builds now support larger images.
- License is now MIT, was previously somewhat ambiguous.
“Unfortunately”, Windows XP will no longer be supported. There was a fair bit of code specific for Windows XP, and I’m not willing to maintain that for a single version of a discontinued operating system. According to visitor statistics, a vast majority of you have migrated to Windows Vista or newer anyway. I hope that I can get the code up on github or similar later on, but that’s not fast or simple process. The biggest issue is the test data, as I do not necessarily have permission to redistribute all of it.
So glad I found this image viewer. Had been using the superb but highly unknown Bmap image viewer [1] prior to this for almost all image formats, as it was exactly the type of no-nonsense viewer I love. When I first discovered it essentially it reminded me of an improved Quicktime Picure Viewer but lightweight, fast, with (still imo) unequaled image downscaling quality, and PSD viewing support.
As for features I appreciate in Pictus that were previously in my Bmap wishlist: animated GIF and transparent PNG support (in addition to the transparent background color picker), centering images on screen while navigating, zoom/panning, unicode filename support. Wrote a little post about it today on the Portable Freeware forum [2].
Although I stumbled upon Pictus while searching for a way to add PSD thumbnails to Windows Explorer it has since become my default image viewing app, and will be recommending it to others especially for it’s animated GIF support (seriously, a very underrated feature for those who frequently use gifs and considering Windows Photo Viewer abandoned GIF support).
You mentioned there were no plans currently for feature requests but I’ll share a couple anyway. Fitting the window to the image size is something I’ve love to see and miss from Bmap, as currently when resizing down the window width stays the same and exposes the background color on both sizes. Also being able to maximize the window to scale the image would be nice.
Thanks again for the great app. Sometimes they can come from the most obscure places 😉
[1] http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130115094516/http://www.geocities.jp/fujimakoto/main_en.html
[2] http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=21611
Hola!
“Resize window to fit image” is available in the settings. It is supposed to make sure the window neatly fits the image, except for very small images. If it misbehaves it is probably a bug.
Thanks for the reply! Actually saw that setting, but it doesn’t quite behave the way I expected it to, as the window isn’t fully wrapped to the image. I took a recording of this as a WebM video [1], and compared it to the Bmap image viewer behavior. You may also notice the Bmap window can be moved by dragging anywhere on the image.
Another thing I found while testing is that when both ‘Resize behavior: Reduce or Enlarge’ is enabled and ‘Resize window to fit image’, images when opened are for some reason scaled to the full height of the screen, rather than being 1:1 size first (in the video capture I have it set to ‘Reduce only’ though). Seems like a bug.
[1] Video capture: http://webm.zone/v/1qs
Think I’ve noticed a bug with the rendering of some PNG images, and GIFs. PNGs with alpha transparency but saved with the ColorType metadata of ‘Palette’ display with a solid black (or white) background. Image viewers like Windows Photo Viewer, and browsers however display these PNGs with their correct transparency.
From looking at the metadata of various other images it appears most PNGs are saved with the ‘RGB with Alpha’ ColorType, which of course display fine in Pictus.
Also certain non-solid GIF files display with a similar black background, rather than the expected clear background as seen in other viewers. Couldn’t find a reason for this one though.
Example PNG with the issue: http://i.imgur.com/hVOz1zh.png
Example GIF which displays with black background: http://i.imgur.com/lpwebh6.gif
Thanks for the excellent bug report (and feature request)! I’ll look into those funky backgrounds when I’m near a proper computer again, should probably be fairly easy to fix. I’ll have to think about that feature though, it feels a bit distant from “ordinary” windows behavior. I do see the point of it though.
Thank you for providing this great tool to the world. It has made my life better.
Hi,
Which is, and where to find it, the last version supporting Win XP???
Thanks,
Eitan