HoneyView

Pros

• Freeware
• Bookmarks
• Slideshow feature

Cons

• None

HoneyView is a robust image viewer with specific support for comics and manga.

HoneyView is image viewing software developed by Bandisoft. The software is freeware, which means that you can download, install and use the tool at no charge. This is a complete image viewer that emphasizes the user experience and seems to have practically any feature one could want.

HoneyView is fast. It opens and transitions between images without delay, and that includes those really big HD images. You can expect this kind of performance even on older machines. The user interface is well-organized and makes the program easy to navigate. It is a great design choice to use menu labels like Slideshow, Bookmark and Copy To rather than the traditional and more obscure options.

Users can expect support for practically all used image formats. This support includes BMP, DNG, GIF, JPG, PNG, TGA and TIFF. You can display one or two pages of images at a time, and the program supports editing, such as rotate, stretch or zoom. This editing can be momentary and thus not saved, or it can be saved to a copy of the image or the original source. HoneyView even lets you set the resampling method—bilinear, bicubic, Lanczos—and add effects, such as gamma correction.

The bookmark feature is excellent. You can have permanent bookmarks for those images you view all the time. You can also have temporary bookmarks for when you, for instance, have to break off in the middle of a magazine and want to return to that spot later. A slideshow feature lets you create slideshows that you can name, contain their own images and run at their own speeds.

HoneyView is also available in a portable version, and there is no feature loss between the portable edition and the installed version. Portable means that you can have it on USB flash drive along with all of the images that you want to archive and view.

This is particularly convenient for those who use a program like HoneyView to read comics and manga. HoneyView even has support for compressed image archives, such as ZIP/CBZ and RAR/CBR. Since a comic in image format will often comprise two dozen or so loose images—which are scans of the pages—such archives are used to keep those scans together and in order.

The UI is a bit on the dated side from the perspective of Windows 10, which it fully supports. That could have been a con, but HoneyView is also fully skinnable, and if the dated aesthetic bothers you, you should be able to enhance it to a look that you do enjoy.

Pros

• Freeware
• Bookmarks
• Slideshow feature

Cons

• None