The information about the currently viewed image is displayed in a condensed manner at the bottom of the screen in the form of a status bar. Navigating through images can be done through either keyboard or mouse. You can choose how you want images that are too big or too small to be handled, and you can also set how the program should behave when it comes to resizing the window. The full-screen mode, just added in this version of the program, marks the end of the lack in this area. Once you have the images opened, you can choose how you want to view them. Xee does not process child directories, so you will only see the contents of the folder you dropped onto it with none of the contents of its children. Because of the way the application is written, dropping an image will actually open up the folder that contains it, so you can automatically view all the other images that are next to the one you dropped. To view an image in it, simply drop the image or the folder that contains the image on either the window or the dock icon. Xee does away with the embedded file hierarchy to maximize image viewing real estate. It handles itself well in both respects, but also handles what small editing and organizing tasks it takes upon itself nicely. Also, it is intended to be very easy to use with digital photos, and can process the output of most cameras, even in raw format. As a viewer, Xee is meant to be fast and efficient, capable of handling lot of images, often very big, without blinking too much. Xee is at heart an image viewer application, but that does not stop it from touching upon editing and organizing, if only in a superficial way.
Usually, the future usefulness and quality of an image viewer can be determined by looking at it in the early versions, and there are some, like Xee that look good from the get-go. The distinction is not to be made only in the matter of the quality of the image processing, but also considering the additional options and features that the program offers. Image viewers have been around as long as images themselves, and there is little that has not been done in this respect, however, regardless of the many thousands of such programs that have come and gone over the years, there are still good image viewers and bad image viewers.