PillowView

A free and open source image viewer and simple image editor for Windows 10/11 x64 written in Python, based on Pillow and native Windows APIs. Might also be called a Pillow GUI for Windows. Heavily inspired by IrfanView.

PillowView in Windows 11 (dark mode)

Features

• Read/write support for various image file formats, including animation formats
• Basic image editing features, like color corrections, filters, effects...
• Relatively small and fast
• Dark mode support
• Portable (no setup needed, but writes settings to key in registry)
• Extensible by plugins (see below)

Supported image file formats

Core app

• AVIF (read/write)
• BLP (read/write)
• BMP (read/write)
• CUR (read)
• DCX (read)
• DDS (read/write)
• DIB (read/write)
• FITS (read)
• FLI/FLC (read)
• FPX (read)
• FTEX (read)
• GBR (read)
• GIF (read/write)
• ICNS (read/write)
• ICO (read/write)
• IM (read/write)
• IPTC/NAA (read)
• JPEG (read/write)
• JPEG2000 (read/write)
• MSP (read/write)
• PCD (read)
• PCX (read/write)
• PDF (write - read support via ghostscript plugin, see below)
• PIL (read/write, see below)
• PIXAR (read)
• PNG (read/write)
• PPM (read/write)
• PSD (read)
• QOI (read/write)
• RAW (read/write)
• SGI (read/write)
• SUN (read)
• TGA (read/write)
• TIFF (read/write)
• WAL (read)
• WEBP (read/write)
• WMF/EMF (read)
• XBM (read/write)
• XPM (read)

Via Plugins (read only)

• AI (Adobe Illustrator)
• Camera RAW formats (many)
• CDR (CorelDraw)
• EPS/PS
• FH/FHx (Macromedia FreeHand)
• MNG
• ODG (OpenDocument Graphic)
• PDF
• PICT (Mac Pict)
• PSD and TIFF with 16 and 32 bits (floating point) per channel.
• SVG
• Video file formats (many)

Animation formats

• AVIF
• FLI/FLC
• GIF
• PNG/APNG
• WEBP

Multi-page/multi-size formats

• ICNS
• ICO
• PDF
• TIFF
• Video file formats (many)

Plugins

dcraw

Read support for various Camera RAW Formats, based on dcraw.

ffmpeg

Import frames from video files as images via FFmpeg (requires ffmpeg.exe).
There is no video player (pointless), instead video files are opened as virtual multi-frame images.

freeimage

Read-only support for additional file types PICT, MNG and 48/64/96/128-Bit PSD/TIFF, based on FreeImage.

ghostscript

Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) read/write, Adobe Illustrator (AI) read and PDF read support, based on Ghostscript.

jpeg-transform

Lossless JPEG transformations, based on jpegtran.

libreoffice

CorelDraw (CDR), Macromedia FreeHand (FH/FHx) and OpenDocument Graphic (ODG) read support, based on headless LibreOffice Draw (requires LibreOffice)

ocr

Optical character regognition (OCR) based on Tesseract (requires tesseract.exe).

paint

Paint Toolbar for drawing shapes, lines, arrows and text.

scanner

Scanning support using the TWAIN API, based on pytwain. Works fine in combination with VueScan.

svg

SVG read support, based on CairoSVG.

wpd

Take and import a picture from a digital camera connected via USB using the Windows Portable Devices (WPD) API. Only supports cameras that implement the WPD_FUNCTIONAL_CATEGORY_STILL_IMAGE_CAPTURE feature. Since recent Windows Explorer does a good job concerning browsing the storage of connected WPD devices, this plugin does not try to replicate this feature, it's only meant for taking pictures.

PIL image file format

PillowView supports a custom file format called PIL (.pil) that allows to save and load images with any image mode that Pillow supports. There is also a Thumbnail Handler Shell Extension for Windows that allows Windows Explorer to show thumbnails for PIL files (15 modes supported).