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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.
In 2015, the image management world was split between heavyweight tools like Adobe Bridge and Lightroom, free OS defaults (Windows Photo Viewer, Preview), and the increasingly popular PhotoScape or IrfanView. XnView sat firmly in the "power user utility" camp. Core Strengths (2015 Context) 1. Unmatched Format Support By 2015, XnView supported over 500 image formats (including 70+ read-only RAW formats from almost every camera manufacturer). It could open obscure formats from the 1990s (Amiga IFF, Atari IMG) that even Photoshop had abandoned. This was its #1 selling point. xnview review 2015
By 2015, Picasa had excellent face recognition and Google Maps integration. XnView had none of that. Its "category" tagging was manual and clunky. While it supported RAW, decoding a 24MP Canon
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. XnView sat firmly in the "power user utility" camp
The portable version ran perfectly off a USB 2.0 stick. Memory usage rarely exceeded 50MB even with large directories. Weaknesses & Frustrations (2015 Perspective) 1. The Interface Aged Poorly Even in 2015, XnView looked like a Windows 2000 application. Icons were small, gray, and unintuitive. New users would struggle to find "Lossless Crop" or "JPG Rotation" buried in menus. The dual-pane browser (tree + thumbnails) was functional but ugly.
On a standard 2015 PC (e.g., Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, HDD), XnView loaded in under 2 seconds. Batch renaming 200 JPEGs or converting a folder of RAW to PNG took a fraction of the time compared to Picasa or FastStone.