If you are looking for a program, which:
  • takes hundreds of megabytes off your HDD/SSD capacity while being advertised as "lightweight" or "lite"
  • takes "forever" in terms of time plus "gigabytes" in terms of memory usage just to start processing a folder of a few hundred images
  • is written with ❤️ (or whatever) in Javascript / node.js / Electron or other "technology" enabling "less-than-expert programmers […] to develop fast systems"
  • runs only on the very latest and greatest, rainbows and unicorns version of the operating system
  • does "Hollywood style" slide shows and effects
then you are clearly in the wrong place. This particular one is a no-frills, no-nonsense tool for people who – the same as myself — have to deal with large numbers of image files frequently. It surely doesn't do everything (yet? :-), but what it does, it does well. At least that's what I strive for. That's because, you know, I need to use it myself rather often. Oh yes and its "weight" is still measured in kilobytes, more than half of which take the Apple-required high resolution icon set and default/placeholder images ;-) And it runs correctly even on the fantastic (and fantastically outdated today), beautiful Mac OS X version 10.6. That in case you need e. g. to continue to run some scanner software, which does not run on newer versions.

I decided to write it because my requirements for the tool were as usual deceptively simple:
  • drop an image file(s) or folder(s) with image files on the application icon/window
  • handle loading image lists of – say – quarter milion images within one lifetime of the user
  • quickly navigate through lists of images regardless of their size
  • easily switch views of the image scaled to either full-screen or window bounds. Or unscaled in 1:1 pixel size
  • easily view image rotated 90, 180, 270 degrees, without (!) persisting the (often lossy) rotation in the file itself
  • support shortcut actions to easily distribute (copy, move) images across predefined destination directories
There were obviously more wishes and potential nice-to-haves but the above were qualified as essentials aka must-haves. Sure thing — after losing lots of time researching and testing various available options, I found it necessary to lose even much more time writing something that would fulfil the requirements

Here they are (plus a few more) materialised:

https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/sdview/id1526830373

To be continued…