The Snapact is Photo Organizer and photo sharing tool that  allows organizing photos into albums that can be shared online with others.You can also use the tool as an offline image viewer as an Windows Photo Gallery alternative.

It also has a carousal style image viewer, that makes browsing through the photo albums a lot easier in full screen.To start the carousal just double click on an image in the image explorer.All the basic image editing can be done and saved in the carousal view itself.You can also assign an external image editor like Paint.net as the image editor from the settings in this application.

Features:

• Add descriptions, keywords, or tags to you images to improve search and categorization features.
• Create photo albums with simple “drag and drop”.
• Create new albums, add or remove images from your existing albums without being connected to the Internet and sync with online album easily later.
• Includes editing features such as crop, rotate, redeye removal, and color adjustment.

The tool offers image manipulation tools for

• Cropping tool
• Brightness & Contrast,
• Blur Adjustment
• RedEye Removal tool
• Negetive and Black and White Effects, and
• Image Management functions for tag and meta data editing.

Drop basket feature lets short listing images and the images in the drop basket can be viewed separately, and the creation of virtual albums which can be uploaded and shared online using the Snapact photo sharing service.

I think many would like this as a replacement to the windows default image viewer and works with Windows XP and Vista.

Download SNAPACT