Fire

Fire - Fast Image REview - is an image viewer optimized for time-to-first-pixel when double-clicking a file in Explorer or Finder. It has features to help in game development workflows that regular image viewers usually don’t cover. Fire was built because of my frustrations with existing image viewers: slow, and no one covers everything I want from an image viewer. Fire is also strictly an image viewer and NOT an editor: good image editors already exist, please use them for editing, Fire can launch the image into them if you set it up for that.

Fire runs on Windows (x86_64) and macOS (Apple Silicon) from one shared codebase: the window, event loop and input are winit’s, the GPU work goes through sokol_gfx (Direct3D 11 on Windows, Metal on macOS), and the only platform-specific code left is a device/swapchain module per OS plus a handful of small leaves.

You can access the project source and releases for Windows and Mac OS on the GitHub repo.

Features

• View the contents of individual R, G, B, and A channels
• View images against different backdrops (black, white, grey, checkerboard)
• Flipbook player with automatic grid detection logic and playback controls
• Support for all source image formats needed for game development
• Tonemapping and exposure controls for HDR images
• Uses the fastest possible library for decoding each image format
• Hot-reload: the displayed image re-decodes automatically when its file changes on disk
• The image is decoded off-thread and presented on the GPU through a vsync-paced swapchain (a DXGI flip-model swapchain on Windows, a CAMetalLayer on macOS)
• Perfectly smooth frame locked zoom and pan operations even on huge image files, with zoom snapping to common steps and a pixel-crisp 1:1 (one texel per physical pixel, so it stays crisp on a Retina display)
• Full-screen mode (F11) that hides all chrome and gives the image the whole monitor
• Fully customizable keyboard shortcuts (Settings \ Keybinds), layout-independent and shared between both operating systems - Primary+ means Ctrl on Windows and ⌘ on macOS
• Honors EXIF orientation
• DPI-aware, dark-mode-aware toolbar, status bar, flipbook controls and settings window drawn by Dear ImGui into the same backbuffer as the image
• An octagon overlay mode to visualize how image would get cropped by octagon polygon shape in VFX systems in game engines
• A customizable context menu that covers basic operations and allows for user defined behavior