Lightning-fast and Lightweight Image Viewer
Experience the next generation of image viewing software. It brings you incredible loading speeds, minimal memory usage, and a suite of powerful built-in tools.
Easily find photos by their taken date, batch convert HEIC images to JPEG, and elevate your image viewing experience with powerful real-time visual effects.
Completely free for both personal and commercial use.
Clean design, no ads, no bloat — just pure speed.
Version:
Release:
Size:
Requirements:
v1.3 ( build 2501 )
April 8, 2025
2.4 MB
Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
I understand that speed is the most important feature in an image viewer. PhoXoSee is built with performance as a top priority.
Thanks to highly optimized code, you will enjoy smooth performance when launching the app, browsing images, or performing operations, even with large images.
With its minimal footprint, the software takes up very little disk space, the installation package is only 2.4MB, making it ideal for any computer.
Due to its compact design, it uses very little memory, minimal impact on your work or internet browsing. You can even run it in a virtual machine.
The function inherited from PhoXo has been optimized for modern multi-core CPU, enabling real-time image processing. Operations like brightness adjustment and sharpening can now be done without the need for professional image processing software.
When displaying large images, it utilizes Mipmap technology to enhance image quality, improving your viewing experience.
It offers several useful tools, such as searching photos by capture date, displaying the GPS location where the photo was taken, and batch converting from HEIC to JPEG format.
The UI is fully configurable, supporting both full-screen and borderless image viewing, and it comes with built-in support for 12 languages.
Additionally, a portable version is available for those who need it.
The birth of PhoXo is an interesting story. Back in 1998, when I had just started university and began learning C++, at the beginning, I just wanted to write a simple image program to help me learn C++. However, I soon became deeply fascinated with image processing. After graduating, I released PhoXo V1.0 in 2003, and I spent the next ten years developing it in my spare time.
So why did I stop its development after 2014? Mainly because its kernel was still based on the code I had written during my university days, no longer suitable for modern OS and CPU. Maintenance became very difficult. It was like the first-generation Iron Man suit - it needed an upgrade. So, I decided to rewrite it, which is a big project. Combined with my slow pace, it might take 3-5 years before a new version of PhoXo is released.
Over the years, as the number of photos on my computer grew (more than 70,000 photos), I needed a fast image viewer to look at photos and also help me search photos by their capture date. However, many software options on the market were large and slow, despite being primarily image viewing tools. They included so many features for photo management and editing.
So, I decided to create my own. From the beginning of development, I determined that its core functionality would be image viewing with extreme speed-just that one function, while editing features would be moved to a separate program. This is the story behind the birth of PhoXoSee.
This is also why PhoXo has so many image processing features, while PhoXoSee has almost none. Next, I plan to create a small image processing tool for PhoXoSee called PhoXoMini.
In the blink of an eye, it has been 20 years since the first version was released in 2003. The CPU has changed from a single core to a multi-core, and the smallest unit of memory appears to have shifted from KB to GB. Finding software packages under 10MB seems nearly impossible. Developers who once pursued performance are now considered old-fashioned. However, the original intention of the PhoXo series software remains unchanged: to develop lean, high-performance, user-friendly software. This was true in the past and will continue to be so in the future.