Reviews of FastStone Image Viewer

1. 
   PAEzz

   Reviewing 4.0 (Nov 24, 2009)

   I love this app.
   The best fullscreen mode around, lots of tools/information/options all available just by moving the mouse to an edge of the screen (love the directory viewer).
   Add to that the screen capture, slideshow builder, contact sheet maker and lots of other great tools, it really is the ultimate image viewer.
2. 
   FatBastard

   Reviewing 4.0 (Nov 23, 2009)

   This is the best picture viewer EVAH (in my opinion) and it's free !!!
3. 
   B__B

   Reviewing 3.9 (Sep 19, 2009)

   Cannot live without that little great utility.
   The program is well organized, resembles ACDSee before it became bloated, it is quite fast, and is very stable.
   I do no longer waste time and trash the hd with Picasa and such heavyweight applications when I can look and manage my pics' folders with FastStone.
4. 
   NoOneImportant

   Reviewing 3.9 (Sep 15, 2009)

   I used to use a shareware viewer. Faststone does everything I need for free and the latest version is even keyboard compatible with it. However the shareware felt faster because it prefetched the next photo and cached the thumb nails.
   
   Caution: lossless jpeg rotation changes one dimension of the resolution of the photo into a multiple of 8 on my PC.
5. 
   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.

Discuss FastStone Image Viewer

1. Nov 18, 2009 - 11:35 PM
   MetaFS

   Multiple Instances: From my time as a windows-programming professional it was quite easy to allow multiple instances, does anyone know why FS is without support for multiple instances ?
   Or did it get really complicated with the modern Windows-Versions?
   
   I definitely hope to see this feature to start more than one instance.