> I don't get how an app like this makes a difference. Isn't an image viewer just reading from disk, using whatever image decoding library that's standard, and copying to screen?

Memory leaks could happen anywhere in the process. Allocate a surface for the bog standard decoder to draw on, forget to release the surface, boom you have a leak.

It possibly doesn't help that raw files are likely to be especially heavy.

burnoutdv should report a bug if not done already.