Advanced Viewer (ADV) is a program designed to manage media files (images, audio and video). It includes media viewer, image editor, image batch processor and text editor (including saving to PDF and HTML feature).

The design of the program is a standard Windows that I prefer more than complex designs with non-rectangular windows and other effects, because they might slow down a system.

The program always starts from a viewer window. There are two areas in the window: left one is designed to explore hard disks for media files, and in right area selected image file is displayed:

The interface of the program and program functions can be customized with a great set of options in a window called by clicking File->Settings menu item:

As to work of the viewer, the following should be noted. The viewer successfully reads all standard picture files. Selected group of files can be also viewed as a slide-show.

By double clicking on an audio file it is being played in a separate small window. ADV supports only MP3, WAV and MIDI files, that is not quite sufficient now, because some other file formats, such as Windows Media, are also quite popular.

By double clicking on a video file it is also being played in a separate window as an audio file. But only standard MPEG files are played correctly. When I tried to play DivX movies, the program played some of them without sound, some with inappropriate play rate, and some just did not played at all.

As a whole, the viewer has usual functionality for viewing files. As an advantage of ADV I would mention the time of starting the program. It is quite short compared to such complex programs as ACDSee, but still not so short as of standard Windows XP pictures and faxes viewer.

An important feature of ADV is that it can perform some tasks not only for single files but for groups of files (batch processing). Namely it can perform the following operations: files renaming (changing file names to a specified constant part plus number) and image file types conversion (for example, BMP to JPEG conversion). For file conversion specific settings of output file type (for example, Quality parameter of JPEG files) may be set.

Another important component of the program is the image editor:

Here one may apply the following operations to images: geometrical operations (rotation, flip, crop selection, clear selection), resizing, color operations (invert, greyscale, brightness, gamma, contrast, saturation, color channels, color balance, auto contrast/levels, equalization, channel mixer), filters (some types of noise, red-eye remover, matrix filters and editor of matrix filters), effects (interlacing, raster, triangles, frame, shadow, gradient). As one can see, the editor performs all the necessary operations required for post-processing of images, with «auto» operations (auto contrast, auto levels, equalizer) being sometimes very helpful. For me it is very convenient, because formerly I had to use various editors to apply different operations, and it was not good at all.

Some more valuable features of ADV are utility to acquire images from TWAIN device, such as a scanner, and Text Reader Plugin that can be used to view and edit text and RTF files:

It is worth noting, that this text editor supports saving files as HTML and PDF files, with various settings of output PDF files, such as compression and security, being available for changing. This saving as PDF feature, presented here as just additional functionality, is a great plus of the program, because usually other developers provide it as a separate product for extra price.

So, ADV includes a lot of useful features. Every utility is opened in its own window. At that all this windows are organized in a quite convenient way, so that every next window opens in place of the current one, and there is always only one ADV window presented in task bar.

To sum up, ADV is a really convenient application with many useful tools. But still it has some unfinished things (I am talking about video preview) which require further improvement. As a whole, I think Advanced Viewer can successfully replace a big number of other programs usually used for work with media files, and especially with images. If you want to try the program for yourself, then download a trial version that can be used 30 days without any limitations.

Advanced Viewer keywords: image, file, convert, morph, morphing, view, viewer, jpeg, jpg, gif, mp3, avi, video, movie, morphing, browser, slide, editor, edit, album