Polyview

Polyview is a basic image viewer and editor that lets users organize, edit, and export images. Although it has a few extra features that we liked, overall, the program is not particularly impressive.

The program's interface is basic and not intuitive. A series of tiny buttons across the top of the screen have mouse-over tooltips, while the rest of the program's functions are contained within drop-down menus. It's not immediately obvious how one should get started upon opening the program, but a bit of clicking around reveals the program's features. The program's Explore feature is practically useless; it seems as though it should display thumbnails of images available on the user's computer, but instead displays gray boxes with the file name; this is not helpful and is the program's biggest flaw. The program's built-in Help file is well-written and thorough. The program contains most of the features that you would expect from a basic image editor, including color, contrast, and saturation controls, cropping and rotation tools, scratch removal, and so-on. The program's slideshow feature was nice, although it was not clear how to add music, a feature that the program supposedly offers. We liked the fact that the program allows images to be exported using more than 20 different file types, including the Photoshop PSD format. Overall, the program did not amaze us, but it is not a bad choice for a basic image editing program.

Polyview is free to try. It installs politely and uninstalls cleanly. We recommend this program to all users.