qIV 3.0

QuickImageViewer now has a phone. qIV Remote is on Google Play — free, no ads, no account. It turns any phone or tablet into a remote control, a second screen, or a photo frame this app drives, as many at once as you have devices lying around.

The desktop side gets two new features, a long list of fixes, and one silent data-loss bug that had been there a while.

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Find duplicate pictures — Ctrl+D

Scans every folder qIV knows and lists the pictures you have more than one copy of.

• Identical copies only. Files are grouped by size first, so almost nothing is read; only files that share a size are opened, hashed, and then compared byte for byte before anything is reported. A re-encoded or rotated version is a different file and is deliberately not listed.
• You can see them. Results are numbered by group — 1. 1. 1. 2. 2. — so it is obvious which copies belong together, and clicking a row shows every copy in that group side by side with the selected one framed. Identical files usually differ only in name; looking at them together is the only way to be sure.
• You can act on them. Right-click a row or a thumbnail to open it, show it in Explorer, or send it to the Recycle Bin — never a straight delete. A choice made at speed from a list has to be undoable.
• A listing is also written to qivDuplicates.txt beside qIV.

Nothing is ever deleted on its own.

Search every folder, not just this one — Ctrl+Shift+F

Ctrl+F still searches the folder on screen. Ctrl+Shift+F searches every folder qIV knows — the whole history — so you can find a picture by name without remembering where you put it, and open it straight from the result.

Press it while Find is already open and it widens the search you are typing instead of closing the panel; Ctrl+F narrows it back. The panel header says which scope you are in and how many pictures are indexed.

Your folders on the taskbar

Right-click qIV's taskbar button and Windows lists your folders — favourites first, then the most recent — each one opening that folder directly, whether or not qIV is running.

Built from the same history the Tab panel shows, so the two cannot disagree, and rebuilt whenever you navigate or star a folder. Clearing the history clears it too.

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Fixed

🔥 Folders with non-Latin names truncated your history file

Writing a path containing Cyrillic, Greek or accented characters failed silently and discarded every folder after it in the file. qivHistory.txt and qivFavorites.txt are written as UTF-8 now, they keep their CRLF line endings, and existing files read back unchanged.

If your history has been mysteriously short, this is why.

A mistyped password no longer bans you permanently

Five failed connections from one address used to write a permanent entry in qivRemoteServerBlacklist.ini. They now cost fifteen minutes, and only five more earn a permanent one. The temporary block lives in memory, so restarting qIV lifts it — mistyping your own password on a phone should not need a file edited to undo.

-remote did nothing when qIV had nothing to show

Launched with no picture, no remembered folder and no history, qIV opened its file chooser and stopped there — the remote listener never opened its socket, and -full, -slideshow and -hideMouse never applied. The chooser now opens after the rest of startup has run.

And

• -monitorNum#N picks the screen you meant. It used the display driver's order, which bears no relation to the numbering Ctrl+M, the Statistics panel and every other message in the program use.
• File lists sort naturally. promo2 came after promo10 in several places that claimed to match Explorer — including the promotion playlist and four history-maintenance lists, which also sorted case-sensitively.
• A settings import no longer turns an exported "Off" into 100 MB.
• The image cache can no longer overcommit graphics memory. It bounded itself by a count of pictures, so a handful of large animations could hold several gigabytes. There is a byte ceiling now, and evicting against it is linear rather than quadratic.
• Duplicate results stay correct after you delete one. Sending a copy to the Recycle Bin left the remaining rows reading their neighbour's group — which showed copies of a different picture as if they were this one's.
• Four leaks and a race, all on paths that only run when something else has already gone wrong: the SVG payload and the queued remote call when their message cannot be posted, the write queue draining its maps by move instead of swap, the transfer temp-name counter racing between socket threads, and a failed duplicate scan leaving Ctrl+D dead for the rest of the session.

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Also new

• The thumbnail cache can be turned off, and knows how much graphics memory you have. The budget accepts 0, and its maximum is your card's own VRAM, which the dialog shows when it can read it.
• The Statistics panel reports graphics memory and the thumbnail budget.

Under the hood

The test suite went from 320 checks to 459, in 22 groups. The parts worth being sure about are now pure and tested rather than buried in a window procedure — what counts as the same picture, what a wrong password costs, the hygiene every hand-edited history line passes, and which thumbnail a click landed on.

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Download

Windows 10 & 11 — one portable executable, no installer, no Visual C++ Redistributable to install. Unblock it if SmartScreen asks, put it anywhere, run it. To remove qIV, delete the file.

Android 13+ — qIV Remote on Google Play. It is a companion app and does nothing on its own, the way a TV remote does nothing without the TV: you need qIV running on a Windows PC with its Local Server enabled (F9) and the phone on the same network. Its demo mode runs every screen before you connect it to anything.