How To Best View Images

In many browsers (including the Netscape browser and some versions of Mosaic), the large images dowloaded when you click on links to image files are displayed in the browser window. This is certainly convenient, but the rendered image may not be of as high a quality as your computer is capable of. This is particularly true of Netscape for Unix/XWindows, which renders images with far poorer quality than is possible on many workstations.

Instead of rendering large images in the browser window, some browsers (including versions of Mosaic) send the image to a specialized viewer application. Users can specify what application the browser will use, using as sophisticated a viewer as is available to them. Even browsers that render images in the browser window can usually be configured to automatically send them off to a hopefully superior viewer.

To best appreciate images, we recommend that you view them with a specialized viewer, either by reconfiguring your browser, or by saving the images to your hard disk and using a separate viewing application to look at them.

If you are running XWindows on a Unix workstation, we suggest the XV Graphics Viewer, available as shareware by FTP from the /pub/xv directory at ftp.cis.upenn.edu. Note that browsers may constrain your monitor's color map in such a way that optimum viewing will be obtained only if you quit the browser process completely, so that it relinquishes the color map. This is true of Netscape 2.0, for example.

If you are on a Mac, an excellent free viewer is JPEGView (it can view images in many formats besides JPEG, including GIFs). You'll find it at many of the standard Mac archives, and at the JPEGView Home Page.

If you're on an IBM-compatible PC, you're a bit on your own, as we don't use that platform and thus cannot recommend anything based on experience. Good places to look for PC viewer information are Ed Klatt's Viewer Page and Larry's Viewer Page. You might also look around the various PC archives. A nice interface to PC archives (and Mac archives, too) is the Virtual Software Library. Let us know what you find!

A complete, if terse, collection of viewers and players for all major platforms is at the WWW Viewer Test Page. It includes instructions for configuring the most popular browsers, and test images of various formats. This page hosts, not only image viewers, but also "plugins" or "helper applications" for various types of web content, including a variety video, audio, and more specialized formats. Another useful collection of viewers is the Viewers Page hosted by Atmel Semiconductors.

Enjoy your viewing!