By 2015, Picasa had excellent face recognition and Google Maps integration. XnView had none of that. Its "category" tagging was manual and clunky.
On a standard 2015 PC (e.g., Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, HDD), XnView loaded in under 2 seconds. Batch renaming 200 JPEGs or converting a folder of RAW to PNG took a fraction of the time compared to Picasa or FastStone. xnview review 2015
While it supported RAW, decoding a 24MP Canon CR2 file took ~4-5 seconds on a 2015 mid-range PC, and the preview quality was mediocre (lots of noise, poor highlight recovery). Lightroom was far superior, but also $10/month. By 2015, Picasa had excellent face recognition and
Unlike Picasa (which scanned everything into a massive SQLite DB) or Windows Live Photo Gallery, XnView worked on a browser-based system. You navigated folders, it cached thumbnails ( .db files), but never forced you to "import" anything. This made it ideal for external drives and network shares. On a standard 2015 PC (e
