XnView Software

At the bottom of the view pane, there are tabs. (I usually use View 2, but I don't this matters.) I generally always want the "Preview" tab if the file is an image file, unless I deliberately ask for something else. In order to avoid distractions, I removed all of the tabs other than "Preview" that I could by right clicking and un-selecting all the boxes. However, I don't see a way to remove the "Properties" tab. The problem is that if you are browsing a directory with a mixture of image and non-image files, which most directories are, then XnView automatically switches to the "Properties" tab for non-image files, but doesn't automatically switch to the "Preview" tab for image files. This makes it quite annoying to browse the images in such a directory, because you need to manually switch back to the "Preview" tab every time you get to an image file after a non-image file.

Since every image viewing software I've ever used in my life defaults to viewing an image file as an image by default, I assume this is a bug. (Perhaps there's an option I missed that affects this behavior, in which case I think it should still be disallowed or certainly non-default behavior.)

I'm running OSX 10.11.6.

I don't know what you have different. For me non-image files don't switch to properties. It stays in preview, and the preview space becomes all black.

Regards.

could you post a screenshot of the layout used?