You could adjust colors, levels, and apply red-eye reduction, but all were destructive (saved over the original or created a new file). No history panel, no adjustment layers. For serious edits, you still launched Photoshop or GIMP.
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. xnview review 2015
By 2015, Picasa had excellent face recognition and Google Maps integration. XnView had none of that. Its "category" tagging was manual and clunky. You could adjust colors, levels, and apply red-eye
In 2015, the image management world was split between heavyweight tools like Adobe Bridge and Lightroom, free OS defaults (Windows Photo Viewer, Preview), and the increasingly popular PhotoScape or IrfanView. XnView sat firmly in the "power user utility" camp. Core Strengths (2015 Context) 1. Unmatched Format Support By 2015, XnView supported over 500 image formats (including 70+ read-only RAW formats from almost every camera manufacturer). It could open obscure formats from the 1990s (Amiga IFF, Atari IMG) that even Photoshop had abandoned. This was its #1 selling point. While it supported RAW, decoding a 24MP Canon
The portable version ran perfectly off a USB 2.0 stick. Memory usage rarely exceeded 50MB even with large directories. Weaknesses & Frustrations (2015 Perspective) 1. The Interface Aged Poorly Even in 2015, XnView looked like a Windows 2000 application. Icons were small, gray, and unintuitive. New users would struggle to find "Lossless Crop" or "JPG Rotation" buried in menus. The dual-pane browser (tree + thumbnails) was functional but ugly.