FastStone Image Viewer 3.9 Fileforum Pick

4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5 (1226 votes)

(June 8, 2009)

Windows 2000/9x/XP / Freeware / 177,831 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. 5 out of 5 stars
    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.

  2. 4 out of 5 stars
    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.

  3. 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.

  4. 5 out of 5 stars
    us3r

    Reviewing 3.9 (Jun 9, 2009)

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

  5. 5 out of 5 stars
    ZenoLabs

    Reviewing 3.9 (Jun 8, 2009)

    Still the best, men!

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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.

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