PMView uses its own file open dialog, showing thumbnails of all images in a given folder in what PMview calls the "File Open Container", unless the user chooses to see only the filenames.

Image editing features are global color modifications regarding color balance, gamma correction, luminance, negative conversion, solarization, sharpening and softening of edges, and a number of filters including Gaussian blur and user-defined filters.

The program is written in C++ with some routines in Assembler, making heavy use of multithreading, creating and destroying threads as needed, thus enabling PMView to be very fast.

The name dates back to 1992 and OS/2 version 1.x where the graphical shell for OS/2 was called Presentation Manager.

An early OS/2 version of PMView was on the IBM BBS[2] as "pmview86.zip, 231751, 11-30-93, PM Picture viewer.