pViewer 2.1.0

Images open about three times faster, and ImageSharp is replaced.

New

• Ready in the background: after the first use, one hidden pViewer waits, already started, for the next image you open and shows it at once: about 0.2 s instead of 0.7 s from the double-click to the picture (measured on one PC). It stays after the window is closed, keeps about 20 MB of RAM while it waits and does nothing else. Each window is still its own process.
• On by default for a pViewer installed with the setup; Settings › Startup turns it off. Setup, updates and uninstall stop it by themselves.

Changed

• ImageSharp is gone. Its 3.1 line no longer gets security fixes (five advisories in October 2026 are fixed only in the version that needs a license key). Its work is now done by Skia (through SkiaSharp) and by code of pViewer itself: animated GIF, WebP and PNG, TGA, QOI and PBM/PGM/PPM files, the effects, resizing, saving WebP and GIF all work as before.
• Reducing a photo to the 256 colors of a GIF is a little more accurate than before.
• BigTIFF files (TIFF larger than 4 GB, a rare variant) no longer open. Ordinary TIFF is read by Windows as before.
• The installers are about 3 MB larger.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full history.

Downloads

• pViewer-Setup-2.1.0-Full.exe: includes the .NET runtime, works everywhere.
• pViewer-Setup-2.1.0-Light.exe: needs the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime (x64).

Both install per user without administrator rights and upgrade earlier 2.x versions in place; settings are kept. pViewer 2.0.7 and later offer this update automatically.