How to look at a GIF (in Windows)

Friday, 24 August 2007

Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (WPFV) is a bare-bones application for viewing images, but it does the job. Except when it doesn’t; somehow my Windows installation decided that it was going to use Internet Explorer instead of WPFV by default when opening GIF files. The obvious fix for this didn’t work properly, but I found a simple way of getting back to the behaviour I wanted.

I could revert to using WPFV as a default GIF viewer by using Windows Explorer Options, but this seemed to affect only Explorer; if I opened an email attachment in Thunderbird it still tried to use IE. The real answer is simply to re-register the DLL the WPFV uses. Here’s the command to run, courtesy of Leo:

regsvr32 /i shimgvw.dll

Just run this once in your Windows system and all will be right with the world again.

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