Bob Locher Loc: Southwest Oregon

Faststone is a remarkably useful photo organizing and editing program for Windows users, often referenced here, and it is FREE. (Free is good!)

It really is a wonderful program for photography; the organization it gives your files of photos alone would make it invaluable, but it is so much more. Its worst problem is the poor documentation. But once you get started it is not hard to figure out.

To Quote from CNET, taken from the Faststone site:

FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, retouching and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches one of the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, PSD, EPS, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF, ARW, SR2, RW2 and DNG).

As far as I know all of this is absolutely true. Here is a very short tutorial to get you going:

First, download Faststone Image viewer at:

http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

Load the program.

Press F12. This gets you to the settings menu. One the second line down, click on "Thumbnail". Now go to "Thumbnail size". Change the drop down setting to 260 X 195, then ""OK", and escape out. You may have to restart the program to get the change. At this point the program will appear to be a "Windows Explorer" optimized for photos, and in one small part of it that is exactly what it is.

Now, pick a thumbnail image and double click on it to bring it up. It should pretty well fill your screen. With your cursor anywhere in the picture, right click. And the magic begins! Explore the revealed menus. You will see that click on a lot of them will bring up sub-menus. Horizon straightening, cropping, blemish removal. Click on Editing and follow out the sub-menus. After you have tried one out, a simple <CTRL-Z> undoes it if you don't like it. a <CTRL-S> will save the changes once you confirm your desire to do so.. Check out the "colors" and the "effects" sub-menus too.

Also, to magnify a part of an image, press down the control key and use the scroll function on your mouse. Sliding the mouse around moves across the image.

Notice too the "Edit with External Program" option - which setting will when activated open the referenced program and drop the file right into it for further manipulation.

Anyhow, be sure to check it out - it is not difficult to use - all you need do is explore it so you will understand what it is capable of.

If you love photography and use a Windows computer, try it! I can't imagine you not liking it.

Cheers

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Faststone is actually a suite of four different software programs... Two are freebies, while two others are relatively low-cost. http://www.faststone.org/index.htm

I used Faststone Photo Resizer for many years (before Adobe got its act together with Lightroom and added features that did the same things I was using Resizer for).

Haydon

I use FastStone ImageViewer to look through my RAW images quickly to cull the collection. I don't use some of the more advanced features but I prefer the fastloading over Lightroom and avoiding the step of adding images to a catalogue. The slideshow is a nice feature and the histogram/EXIF portion is very functional. I have now replaced a very old version of ACDsee with Fastone's ImageViewer.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Many years ago I got IrfanView (also free), which was basically an image viewer with a few rudimentary editing features. Over the years features have been added and it's now an image viewer with a few rudimentary editing features. The main thing it's really good at is viewing images. It loads very fast, significantly faster than most editors. I use it primarily for image viewing, but occasionally cropping and changing format from jpg to png or bmp or things like that. It's good for running through the images in a folder because the space bar and backspace (or the left and right arrows) move things along quickly. There is a toolbox that goes with it that allows you to add text and make contact sheets and print multiple images in a single job (useful if you have a double sided printer).

FastStone was introduced long after IrfanView so I had gotten used to the way IrfanView did things. I loaded FastStone and tried it out but I didn't notice that it did anything better than IrfanView so I ignored it after that. That was probably 5-6 years ago or maybe more. So I can't really compare the two programs well.

Not sure about FastStone, but IrfanView is Windows only.

GoofyNewfie Loc: Kansas City

Ok, you have my attention now.
ACDSee has been crashing a lot lately.
Will have to check Fastone’s Image Viewer out.
Thanks.

pixbyjnjphotos Loc: Apache Junction,AZ

I have used Faststone Image Viewer for years. Don't even remember how I ran across it. I love the program for all of the features listed above. One feature that I didn't see is the clone and heal function. It is one of the best in any program you want to mention. I use Paintshop Pro Ultimate for my main photo processing. I use Faststone Image Viewer to view my photos and then pass the one I want to process directly to Paintshop Pro. You can set up Faststone Image Viewer to pass photos to any more sophisticated program you might have on your computer. One thing that disappoints me is that Faststone claims that their Image Viewer works in Linux using the Wine interface. It works to a point and that is it only shows about the first 20 photos in your folder. For Windows, I don't think there is an image viewer available by any name that can beat Faststone. Happy viewing and have a GREAT DAY!