When I used Windows, I used to use a program called ACDSee to scroll through large amounts of images within folders. It was a great way to quickly go through any type of images within a folder. This was also very useful because I tend to keep a lot of PSDs of web designs with various version of a design, so ACDSee made it really easy to scroll through and compare them. When I switched to Mac, I couldn’t do this as easily anymore. I went on a hunt to find the best image viewer for Mac, and found a great open source solution in a program called Xee. Xee is light weight, simple, and does everything the old ACDSee did for me. I highly recommend downloading this one.
iPhoto doesn’t really work the way I want it to, since I don’t necessarily want to import every folder of pictures I have on my computer into iPhoto. The new Cover Flow type preview in Leopard almost does an okay job, but I don’t want to have to switch back and forth between Cover Flow view and list view, not to mention resize the Finder window, when I want to scroll through images using the scrollwheel. Preview.app doesn’t cut it at all either. Xee, on the other hand, works just as I need it to. I go to an old archive folder of images, click on an image, and I can scroll through the images without needing to import anything anywhere. It loads images quickly and supports many different formats, including PSD, which was really a bonus for me. If you use “The Unarchiver” to unpack your .zip, .rar, etc files, then Xee provides another benefit: you can scroll through images within the archive before you even unpack it. That’s pretty sweet.
So, if you’re a switcher like me and you miss having the function of ACDSee on your computer, then you need to check out Xee for the Mac. I mean right now.
