I am surprised Adobe has not already produced such a product for this purpose. I posted a suggestion on line for this, and have gotten some others seconding my proposal. They would just need to strip down the code they already have. I would think it would not be all that difficult of a task to produce the viewer. What Adobe should do is provide a freely distributed, stand-alone, Lr viewer, which would allow others to view all of such features created in Lr, much like Adobe did with the PDF reader for documents. Windows Explorer provides the ability to find subsets of images based on any of the metadata: tags, titles and descriptions, etc., put in with LR, but they will never be able to put faces with names. I can publish my hard work for my extended families, and they will be able to know what names are associated with an image, but they will not be able to see which person in the image belongs to which name. The only problem with this feature, is that the tagging can only be viewed within one of the Lr image editing applications. Lr, starting with version 6, includes the ability to tag faces, which I really wanted, and why I upgraded from Lr 5 to Lr6. However, what would be extremely useful would be an Adobe Lr Viewer, like the Adobe PDF reader, but for viewing images enhanced by Lr. As stated, it would not be useful to make either PS or Lr a default image viewer in Windows. The original poster missed the point a image viewer, to view images which have been enhanced by Lr. In most cases, you'll find that image programs are not as lightweight as the Windows photo viewer. You can try to Google 'replacement for windows photo viewer' and you'll see a number of possible alternatives, and can compare the features. But I wouldn't want to make it the default app to open in image file. Lightroom can only open a Lightroom catalog directly, you can't open a JPG or other image file straight into LR without going through the import process.Īdobe Bridge, which comes with Photoshop, is a good file browser in and of itself, and it is a good replacement for Windows Explorer when you're browsing folders of images.

Lightroom is not an option at all - you import your images with Lightroom's internal database, and manage the images there. Trying to use it as a viewer would be like driving a truck to get from one side of the room to the other.

Photoshop is a very heavyweight editor, takes awhile to load, and is designed for editing, not fast viewing. No, I don't think you'd want to use either of these programs to be your default image viewer.

Windows 10 windows photo viewer