nomacs 3.22.0 / 3.23.2 Beta

nomacs opens those same files in about the time it takes to let go of the mouse.

It is free, open-source, and it has been the go-to recommendation for people replacing a sluggish default viewer for well over a decade.

Version 3.22.1 is the current stable build.

It is a small maintenance release on top of 3.22.0, which was a big one - the first non-beta nomacs in quite some time, and worth the wait.

What nomacs Actually Does

At heart it is a viewer, not an editor. You point it at a folder, it shows you thumbnails along the bottom, and you move through your images with the arrow keys.

That is the whole idea, and nomacs is unusually good at it.

The format list is where it pulls ahead of the built-ins. It reads RAW files from Canon, Nikon, and Sony cameras, along with Adobe PSD files, without needing a single plugin installed.

The Windows build ships with JPEG XL support and an AVIF plugin, so the newer formats that make File Explorer show a blank grey box just open.

It also reads images inside ZIP archives and Microsoft Office files, and lets you pull them out to a folder of your choosing.

If you have ever downloaded a zipped photo set and unpacked the whole thing just to check whether it was the right one, that one feature will pay for itself immediately. The 3.22.0 release rewrote ZIP handling substantially, and it shows.

The Feature Nobody Else Has

nomacs can sync multiple copies of itself. Open the same image in two windows and they will zoom, pan, and scroll together. Overlay one on the other with adjustable transparency and you can see exactly what changed.

That sounds like a novelty until you need it. Photographers use it to compare two exposures of the same shot at 100%. Architects use it to lay this month's site photo over last month's.

Anyone checking whether a compression setting actually cost them any quality can put the original and the export side by side and stop guessing. The sync works across a local network too, not just on one machine.

What Changed in 3.22.1 and 3.22.0

3.22.1 itself is small: an updated German translation and security fixes in the Windows build. Both Windows binaries are published with VirusTotal scan links, which is a decent habit for a project to have.

The interesting work landed in 3.22.0:

• Colour management - pick your display profile under Settings and Display, and colours finally look the way they should on a wide-gamut monitor.
• Proper HiDPI rendering - 1:1 pixels at 100% zoom. On a 4K laptop screen, this is the difference between "sharp" and "why does this look soft".
• Much better ZIP archive support.
• Faster, lighter thumbnails - noticeably less memory and CPU on big folders.
• Improved comments and ratings, plus CMYK images now open (converted to sRGB), and your colour profile survives an edit-and-save.
• Translations revived, including a new Simplified Chinese one.

→ Full 3.22.0 release notes.

Under the hood, nomacs now requires Qt6 and the Windows build uses Qt 6.9.3 with OpenCV 4.12.0. Qt5 support is gone. This matters to you only in one way: very old Windows installs are no longer the target. Windows 10 and 11 are.

Installer or Portable

Both are available. The MSI installer is the straightforward choice and makes deployment across several machines painless.

The portable ZIP unpacks and runs - nothing written to the registry, nothing to uninstall, and it will happily live on a USB stick or a locked-down work laptop where you cannot install anything. If you want a viewer that leaves no trace, take the portable.

One tip that saves confusion: nomacs does not grab your file associations on install. If double-clicking a JPG still opens Photos afterwards, that is expected - open nomacs, go to Settings, and tick the formats you want it to handle on the File Associations tab.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

nomacs is a viewer with light editing bolted on. You get brightness and contrast, rotation, resizing, cropping, false colour, and simple collages. That is genuinely enough for most people most days.

If you need more than that, it is the wrong tool and there is no shame in mixing:

• Real editing - layers, masks, retouching - belongs in GIMP, which does most of what Photoshop does for nothing.
• Batch conversion across hundreds of formats is XnView territory. It handles over 700 of them.
• If you want viewing, editing, and slideshows in a single polished package, FastStone Image Viewer is the classic pick.

How It Compares to the Other Free Viewers

The free Windows viewer field is crowded and, happily, genuinely good. Where nomacs wins is the combination of speed, the sync feature, and RAW plus PSD support with no add-ons.

IrfanView is the old reliable - lighter than nomacs and stronger on batch operations, but its interface is showing its age. ImageGlass is the modern-looking one, with native HEIC, AVIF, and WebP and a cleaner interface than anything here.

PicView covers a similar 100-plus format spread with a minimal interface. JPEGView is the minimalist's choice and also handles RAW and PSD. WildBit Viewer leans into slideshows with 176 transitions if that is your thing.

And there is always Microsoft Photos, which has improved a lot and now includes AI editing tools - it is just still the slow one on a big RAW folder.

If you would rather fix the built-in viewer than replace it, the HEIF Image Extensions and HEIC Image Extension add iPhone photo support to Windows directly, and WIC for HEIC does the same job system-wide. The full image viewer list has the rest, and our best AVIF viewers guide is worth a look if AVIF is what brought you here.

Is It Safe?

Yes, and you do not have to take our word for it. nomacs is open-source under the GPL v3, the code is public, and the developers publish VirusTotal scan results for every Windows binary they ship.

There is no bundled adware, no toolbar, no "recommended offers" screen in the installer. It is a volunteer project that has been running since 2011.

If your image viewer makes you wait, nomacs will not. It opens RAW and PSD without plugins, reads inside ZIP archives, syncs two windows so you can compare shots properly, and costs nothing. Grab the installer if it is your main machine, the portable if it is not.

Download nomacs 3.22.1 for Windows - or take a look at the screenshots first.