The following description is based on the ACDSee software but also describes in general how this type of image software works. Image browsing and management software often shows a folder of photographs just as any normal file manager does.

Normally when you open an image management program you see the file window, a hard drive tree structure window, and a window with an enlargement of the selected image. All of these can be resized or completely repositioned into a horizontal instead of a vertical format. Now comes the fun part. When you click a file name, the picture displays in a window within the program. Generally you can resize the window to suit your needs. If you want to view the image full size, you just press the Enter key for a full screen view. Pressing Enter again will take you back to the file listing.

Hitting the space bar will display the next image when the image is viewed full-screen. Some programs are so fast that you can hold the space bar down and quickly flip through hundreds of images at full size.

You can also set a number of viewing options, such as viewing a picture so that it always fills the screen no matter what size, or so it is resized only if it is too big. If you want to compare two or more images that are in different parts of the folder, you can select just those images and then flip back and forth between them, ignoring other pictures in the folder. You can even create slideshows that display an image for a specified number of seconds and loop through the selected images in the folder.

Most image cataloguing software can display all the images in a folder or selected folders in small pictures called thumbnails. These can be quite useful when you want to quickly find an image. Depending on the program, you can either save the thumbnails for faster access next time or have the program generate new thumbnails each time. You can pick the size of the thumbnail, create HTML pages with thumbnails, and print thumbnails. You may find it useful to print out your pages in black and white or color and store them in a folder. Once you have done that, you can write notes about which pictures you want to work on, and also make notes as you are working on pictures, such as the specific settings and changes you made to the image.