Xee Review - OS X’s Missing Image Browser

When I switched to Macs earlier this year there were a few features of Windows XP that I missed. I’ve found workarounds for most of the things I liked, but there was one thats been bugging me. In Windows XP if you navigate to a folder full of pictures you can view the folder as a ‘Filmstrip’. This allows you to navigate through your images and see higher resolution previews than what the finder allows for in ‘View 3 Columns Layout’. Now that I’m using OS X, I find myself constantly opening images in Preview, usually many consecutive images in a folder.

But, today is the day! I’ve found a workaround for the last Windows XP feature that I miss. And Xee is the solution. Here’s what the developers of Xee have to say about their product.

Xee is a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser. It is designed to be a serious tool for image viewing and management, with a sleek and powerful interface.

Xee is useful as a more powerful replacement for Preview, or most any other image viewer available on Mac OS X. It is very fast, and uses less memory than most other image viewing tools. It also uses OpenGL to display and scroll images much more smoothly than other viewers. Its interface is highly streamlined and has easily configurable keyboard shortcuts.

I know that iPhoto does all of what Xee does and more. But, sometimes I don’t feel like opening iPhoto to simply look at a few images. And as I stated earlier, Preview is inefficient at looking at multiple images. The drawer in Preview is nice, but it requires you to select which images you’d like to look at. There is no way to casually look at all the images in a folder with Preview. Thus the need for Xee.

Xee’s interface is clean and simple. There are a few buttons to navigate and rotate your images. At the bottom of the interface is a plethora of information ranging from file size to the date the picture was taken. While Xee provides the ability to crop photos its main use is to simply view your images.

I have yet to set Xee as the default application to open my photos. Once I get more time under my belt using it I’m sure that I will. If you have the same gripe about the small preview images in the finder and Previews inability to look at all the photos in a folder as I do then check out Xee. It’s worth a shot, especially since its FREE :)