FastStone Image Viewer 3.9 Fileforum Pick

4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5 (1219 votes)

(June 8, 2009)

Windows 2000/9x/XP / Freeware / 176,692 downloads

FastStone Image Viewer is an image browser, viewer, converter and editor with an easy to use interface and a nice array of features that include resizing, renaming, cropping, color adjustments, watermarks and more. It also includes an intuitive full-screen mode that provides quick access to EXIF information and thumbnail browser via hidden toolbars that emerge when you touch the edge of your screen with the mouse. Other features include a high quality magnifier and built-in slideshow with 60+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image frames, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA.

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Reviews of FastStone Image Viewer

  1. 4 out of 5 stars
    dhry

    Reviewing 3.9 (Jun 30, 2009)

    FS uses 24Mb on startup, XNView uses 15. XN starts up a split second faster. FS definitely has some good ideas though. such as the menus that you can see when moving the mouse to different edges of the screen in full-screen view mode. I'll up my rating to a 4, but it'll never get 5 until they quit forcing the program to use skins mode. This will give the interface an all-round speed improvement and improve memory usage too. Interestingly enough, FS also have a separate "image resizer program" which supports "batch" mode - this functionality is already built into XNView. Until they improve certain aspects of this program - for example the ability to choose your windows positioning (XN gives you 8 relative layouts to choose from) as well as the terrible speed of viewing pictures with the Lanczos3 smoothing enabled (there seems to be NO read-ahead cache and pics take ages to load, whereas XN, even with high-quality resizing, loads them in an instant whilst both caching ahead and keeping the current image in the cache), I'd suggest simply getting XN - there's literally no point in using FS at this time. They're both free and you just get more with XN.

  2. 5 out of 5 stars
    us3r

    Reviewing 3.9 (Jun 9, 2009)

    Simple, well-thought, powerful, fast, free.

  3. 5 out of 5 stars
    ZenoLabs

    Reviewing 3.9 (Jun 8, 2009)

    Still the best, men!

  4. 3 out of 5 stars
    dhry

    Reviewing 3.8 (Apr 28, 2009)

    STILL forces you to use skins. Not a bad program but it's nowhere close to XNView. Almost not even in the same ballpark. Oh, and you can't relocate the preview window so that it's located under the thumbnails panel - forcing you to either make your treeview too wide or be stuck with a preview panel that's more or less the same size as your thumbnails themselves. Software authors need to hire a GUI designer and user experience modeler on their team.

  5. 5 out of 5 stars
    idodialog

    Reviewing 3.8 Beta (Mar 21, 2009)

    Outstanding program - very intuitive, heaps of really useful keyboard shortcuts, brilliant editing capabilities and heaps of other well implemented powers.

    Top of the wishlist is a clone stamp or healing capability.

    If there is a fault its the locked down skinning limitations - but when it comes to actually using FastStone I think it is way ahead of I-view (and still really light), much more complete than Xnview, and simply better than Picasa. Where it lags behind Picasa is it's slightly more old fashioned feel - but I think it's actually more usable.

    I still have Picasa on board and it's a very good program, but when it comes to viewing, fixing and optimising lots of images - FastStone is the way to go.

    This is a very rich program - I'm still discovering goodies after several years of frequent use. Highly recommended.

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