I use picasa most of the time as welll and it loads fast (I don't see any difference with default viewer). With picasa comes a lightweight viewer that allows you to scroll, zoom, favorite pictures, and do some basis transforming... then you have the picasa manager (comes with the package) and that's what I really like about the program. It can can through all you files really fast and makes a collection of non-rubbish pictures it could find. You can easily exclude folders from being show in picasa. You can have an overview of all your pictures without having to remember where you stored them exactly. (When you save a pic you can see it's automatically added to your collection if you have picasa open. You can tag different pictures in different folders at once, it even has facial regognicion (which I turn off because I find that creepy) and you can geo-tag.... it locates duplicates, can create 'videos' and 100 other things. You can sync it to your online picasa account (now with your google+) but just make sure you set it to private just to be safe. Another good thing about picasa is it's user friendly editing tools. Basically it's what picnick online use to be before google bought them out and so they have a nice healing tool (to delete watermarks, pimples... like a pro)

The person who liked shotwell on linux, should maybe try adobe photoshop lightroom. My favorite image editor is gimp, mainly because it's free, so I don't have to infect myself with virus/rats installing a cracked version of photoshop.


edit: concerning loading time It depends on the computer. I have 10 GB ram and it's def good on my computer :)

Faststone image viewer is one i've been trying out and it's very very good, plus as mentioned it plays your gifs

4 gb of ram here..

picasa loaded faster then the 4th page of this forum topic of wallbase :)
i cliked on the 4th page, then start>picasa(pinned on top of start menu)
loading was done together :)

thanks for extending my list, Riverhead :) you pretty much described it all

Picasa

+ Stylish
+ Fast
+ Simple at first glance, yet sports some powerful stuff
+ Minimalistic design
+ Supports most file formats

- Doesn't do GIF animations
- No choice to only install the Photo Viewer for those of us who have no use for the main application

Modern photo viewers generally don't do GIF animations since an animation, per definition, is not a photo but a series of images. This effectively makes animations into moving medias, and definitely not photos. While I'm all in favor of purists, this in particular have always annoyed me to no end as there doesn't seem to be any minimalistic GIF player/viewer in the same vein as Picasa available for Windows on the Internet.

So for GIF images in particular I've thrown together an ugly but simple viewer on my own.

That's true, I am using that software, it was amazing

+1 for picasa, it's fast and neat.

photoshop for editing

Default+IrfanView and photoshop for editing.

Default or ACDSEE5pro

XnView

FastPictureViewer Professional...

picasa rock

Picasa. Quick, simple. Basically ideal.

Fast Stone, for his quick edition options and overall functionality.

default

Default .

Photo+

avepreview. really nice and changable one.

default.

Default/Honeyvieuw3

Picasa :)

I just do so much photoshop these days that I guess more that 80% of the time I use Adobe Photoshop to view images.

PS, really?
That's like using a space shuttle go to the store.

Don't really view images for sake of viewing images. I mostly edit images now days or view the wallpaper straight off wallbase.
So I just don't seem to get the chance to use the default viewer...

ACDSee Classic 2.44 (no longer available) is my default image viewer, also use Irfanview. Nothing i have tried has come close to the speed of ACDSee Classic for simple image viewing.

Default

Picasa