FishEye - your digital camera goggles

Windows bitmap image viewer Do you have that problem too? You come home after a long day, your digital camera full of promising shots, you download them into your PC and then . . . . you go through a long-winding process of loading the images into your paint-program. Some images must be rotated, some images need scaling and you just wanted to see in a few minutes the results of that day. If you recognize some of this, FishEye is maybe a program for you. Most paint-programs have so many features that simply viewing a set of bitmap files is taking too long. Using your favorite web-browser in some way works better, but still it is not optimal.

What can it do? FishEye's feature set is not huge but fully optimized to what you need when browsing a directory full of images. You open files the usual way ("File -> Open") or when you set FishEye as the default program for bitmap images, you can simply double-click on the file in Windows Explorer. The image will be shown and if it is too big, the size will be reduced to fit in the window. You load the next image in the directory by clicking with your left mouse-button somewhere on the image, or by typing Ctrl-N. Similarly the right button and Ctrl-P (or Ctrl-V) brings you to the previous image. This feature makes it very fast to inspect a whole bunch of images in a short timespan. When you have a "portrait" image you want to rotate it 90°. That's simple: with Ctrl-R you turn right and with Ctrl-L you rotate the image 90° left. And when you browse through the other images, FishEye will remember which images needed rotation. There are two ways to fit the images in your window. In the default mode images are displayed at 100% unless they are too big, in which case they are scaled down. You can switch this on/off with "Options -> Squeezed". The other mode can be selected with "Options -> Stretched". In stretched mode images are scaled upwards or downwards to fill 100% of the window. Finally you can save your image again with "File -> Save As". When you rotated the image the new image you save will be stored in its rotated form. With these features you can quickly browse the images you downloaded from your digital camera. But it is not limited to that, because FishEye supports a wide range of bitmap formats.

And what more? With FishEye version 1.2, I've added a few new features. When you load a JPEG image, then rotate it and do a "Save As", the file will be saved to disk using so-called "lossless rotation". This only works when your image width and height are a multiple of 8, but with camara images that's what they normally are. Another new feature is that FishEye now supports animated GIFs. The only restriction is that it doesn't support (yet) the full spectrum of transparence / background redraw methods that are possible. But with 90% of the animated GIFs that's no issue.

BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF support FishEye started off as a single-format PNG viewer with the name VisualPng. Most digital camera images are however stored in the JPEG-format. To accomodate too all common formats on the Web and in the Windows world, FishEye can now open files in bmp, gif, jpeg, png and tiff format. Saving files can be done in either JPEG or PNG format. There first is the preferred format for photos from digital cameras or images created with a scanner. The PNG format is a better choice for bitmap images created with paint-programs like Adobe PhotoShop or PaintShop Pro. PNG uses a so-called lossless compression, with which no quality degradation will occur after re-saving the image. Jpeg uses a lossy compression that manifests itselve clearly with artifical images and that will get worse after many times loading and re-saving an image.

Installing the program To start using the FishEye program and try it out, click here or on the icon on the left. Store the zip-file in some temporary space. Use any unzip program to extract the two executables and the textfiles in any directory you like (allthough somewhere under "Program Files" is the better spot) and probably make a shortcut to it for on your Desktop. If you make FishEye the default application for the five bitmap formats, you can view images just by double-clicking on them in Explorer. You do this, by opening Windows Explorer (not IE) and then from the "View" menu you select "Folder Options". Select "File Types" and then either modify an existing type or add a "New type". In the following window provide a name and give the file-extionsion and then click on the New button under Actions. Create a new action called "Open" and use the Browse button to find your copy of FishEye. Click "OK" and then "Change Icon", click "Browse" to find again the FishEye.exe file and select the fishy icon. Couple of times "OK" and "Close" and you are all set. You should do this for all five formats.

FishEye is shareware FishEye can be used for 30 days free of charge to try it out. After that you must register your copy and pay the price of US$ 15 or equivalent. No distinction is made between commercial and non-commercial or personal use. You can pay by credit-card through www.regsoft.net. After I receive your payment, I will send you an email with a code. Save the email I sent you as a text-file in the directory that contains FishEye.exe and FishKey.exe. Then double-click on the FishKey program, or run it in an MS-DOS box. FishKey will than "personalize" your copy of FishEye and take away the few nagging features that were present in the original copy. If you don't think the program is worth those fifteen bucks, you must delete it, but you can always fall back on my freeware program VisualPng. But that is only viewing PNG images and not all the other types.

  Willem van Schaik, Calgary, June 2002     http://www.schaik.com/wwwillem.html