Add Zoom,Rotate and Pan controls to Chrome Image viewer

Updated on September 1, 2017

By default you can view images in Chrome web browser, but it lacks in controls like zoom, rotate and pan. Here’s a cool extension called “Image Viewer”, that can enhance the Image viewing capabilities of Google Chrome. For instance., if you open an image in new tab, extension will provide better interface for viewing the image – where you can rotate, zoom-in, zoom-out and pan. The extension can open any image displayed on a web page or an image that are dragged & dropped from local storage.

Image viewer extension for Chrome

Go to Google web store and search for Image viewer and install the extension. Once installed, you have to provide extension with the privilege to open the image from hard disk. To do that, just copy the below text and paste in the browser URL box,

chrome://chrome/extensions/

Under the Image viewer extension, check “Allow access to file URLs“. Now, you can just drag & drop an image from the local hard disk into the browser. The extension will open the image with grey background with the controls at the bottom of the tab (move the mouse to the bottom of the browser to view the controls).

Enable image viewing for local disk images

To view the images displayed on a webpage, just right click and select “view images in Image Viewer“. This will open the images in the same tab hiding other details of the webpage showing only the images. Move the mouse to the bottom of the tab to view the controls. To rotate the image, you have to hold down the “Alt” key and use your mouse wheel. To restore the image to its original size, just double click anywhere on the viewer. You can customize the options, by right clicking on the “Image viewer” icon from the browser tool bar and selecting “Options“.

Image viewer options
Right click on the Image viewer icon on the chrome toolbar and select Options

Simple isn’t it? At least i love it. Checkout the extension here and lets us know if you find similar tools for Chrome.

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