Image viewers

[accelerate]

I'm looking for an image viewer with the following two requirements:

1) Extended character / foreign language support
2) Can open multiple images at once.

I've been using Faststone, but it refuses to open any image file with Chinese characters (of which I have a lot of), and as far as I can tell, it can't display multiple images simultaneously. Nor can the version of XnView that I tried (though admittedly it was an older version from about 2-3 years ago).

Previously, I had been using ACDSee 3.1, which could handle both the above requirements, and was super fast, but I lost my registered copy, and I figured it was time I used something made recently.

Suggestions?

 

[Herald85]

What do you mean exactly by opening multiple images at once?
I usually recommend Irfanview.

 

[accelerate]

I mean you can display two or more images side by side (ie, have multiple image windows open). For instance, Faststone, you can only see one image at a time.

 

[Bubbaleone]

The IrfanView website has a huge number of plugins available. One is Ansi2Unicode which allows IrfanView to read filenames with unicode characters (Chinese for example). Another available plugin is RIOT which allows IrfanView to save optimized JPG/GIF/PNG files in a side-by-side comparison. For free, you might find them worth checking out to see if it suits your purpose.