HawkView vs Pineapple Pictures

HawkView is a Windows image viewer for viewing, editing, converting, and presenting images. It supports around 40 formats, including HEIC, AVIF, JPEG XL, camera RAW, PSD, SVG, and animated formats. Its GPU-accelerated viewer streams visible areas of images up to 64 megapixels using 512-pixel tiling. Editing includes cropping, straightening, flipping, and lossless 90-degree JPEG rotation, with changes held in memory until saved or discarded. Slideshows provide 36 transitions, background music, and MP4 export at 720p, 1080p, or 4K. The app reads and edits more than 40 EXIF, IPTC, and XMP fields and displays geotagged photos on OpenStreetMap; locations can open in Google Maps. Images, edits, and settings remain on the computer, with no accounts, sign-up, ads, or tracking. Update checks and anonymous crash reports are optional network uses. HawkView supports 64-bit x64 Windows 10 and 11 and is distributed through the Microsoft Store, direct installer, or portable ZIP. Personal use is free; professional or commercial use requires a paid license.

Pineapple Pictures is an image viewer for opening common image formats on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its listed formats include JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, PSD, KRA, XCF, TGA, HDR, and AVIF. A Stay-on-Top setting can keep a reference image visible above other software while you work. The project also lists RAW support and a metadata viewer; optional libexiv2 support is recommended for showing more image metadata.

The viewer is free, and Pineapple Pictures as a whole is licensed under MIT, though individual files may have other compatible licenses. Downloads are linked through GitHub Releases, SourceForge, Arch Linux AUR, itch.io, and FlatHub. Format availability depends on Qt imageformats plugins, which users may need to obtain from their distribution or build themselves on Windows. Release 1.6.0 lists Linux with Qt 6.4 or later and a stacking window manager, Windows x64, and macOS ARM. The maintainer says the project will remain in maintenance mode for the foreseeable future while continuing to receive updates. An itch.io purchase supports development and provides experimental additional format support.