Tech tip time -- help wanted

[ejp626]

First off, let's not have some long debate about how crappy it is to run MS Windows products on a PC and how I would be better off with Apple. I'm not interested.

My problem is that MS used to support Windows Picture and Fax Viewer and they kept scaling it back. You could basically force it back on in XP, but that was the last time. The program has been completely removed in Windows 7 and several tech boards have come up empty in terms of running the program in Windows 7. (Believe me I didn't want Windows 7, but had two computers die on me in the space of two weeks, and had to get something right away, and that's all that's in the stores now. It is better than Vista, but that's about all that can be said for it.)

I am aware of a few competing products like STDU Viewer and IrfanView, but they don't actually have the features I wanted (or I can't make them work properly perhaps). For that matter Windows new Photo Viewer doesn't have them either, and I am definitely not signing up for Windows Live Essentials, which may be the wave of the future, but I'm not having it. If it gets to the point you need that to run Windows system, then I will take the time to learn Linux and go off the grid so to speak.

Anyway, I seem to be one of the last people to use .tif files extensively, but this is what I use to store thousands of scanned articles (in multi-page tifs).

The features that I am looking for are an integrated sidebar with thumbnails of the tifs. The ability to grab multiple pages and rotate them. The ability to cut and paste the individual pages of tifs, both to reorder the main tif file and to cut and paste across tif files. The ability to add notes (this was rudimentary in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer but you could do it). Some basic OCR capability (also rudimentary in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer), but this is not a deal breaker. To actually save the changes...

All of this was handled very well in WPFV and I cannot believe that MS doesn't realize what a step backwards the Photo Viewer is. Or how much better tifs are than pdfs.

Maybe I am not understanding STDU Viewer and IrfanView, but they sure don't seem to have this capability. Anyway, if anyone has suggestions, please let me know. My real preference is to turn on Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in Windows 7, but if there is another program with the features I desire, and it isn't ridiculously expensive, then I would go in that direction. As a last resort, I will probably just get a cheap reconditioned machine that is Windows XP, but that won't last me forever...

Thanks.