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There are many image viewing tools available. FastStone Image Viewer is free, fast, easy to use and includes several commonly used editing features.
After the demise of Firehand Ember, my previous favorite image viewing program, I began searching for a suitable replacement. Window's built in "Picture and Fax Viewer" just doesn't cut it for me.
After much experimentation with various products in this class, I've settled on FastStone Image Viewer.
FastStone includes not only basic display and print ability, but also a number of simple modification tools, a slideshow creator, a contact sheet creator and more.
At it's heart, FastStone, like many similar products, is much like a Windows Explorer tailored for viewing photos. Fire it up and you'll get the familiar navigation tree on the left, and images on the right:
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Double click on an image and you can view it full screen or in a window:
One of what I consider FastStone's hidden gems is that simply by mousing over to the left hand side of an image displayed in full screen view gets you this popup menu:
You can see that there are a number of image adjustment and modification features at your finger tips, including perhaps the most used rotate, resize and crop.
Of course if that's not enough for you, you can configure FastStone to launch an external program of your choosing with a single keystroke. In my case, "E" (for External editor) launches the displayed image in Adobe Photoshop.
FastStone includes a stand-alone slideshow creator which you can use to create a Windows ".EXE" file that when run displays a series of images in slideshow form - a much better alternative than Power Point for sending and displaying slide shows.
Contact sheets are another popular feature. Simply put a contact sheet is an automatically generated single image that contains multiple images within it. Here's a 2x2 contact sheet containing 4 images:
Contact sheets are a quick and easy way to generate a collection of images on a small number of printed pages for easy review.
I've really only touched on some of FastStone's features. At it's heart it's a simple and intuitive image viewer, but comes with a set of easy to use and compelling features as well.
FastStone Image Viewer is free for personal/home use.
I recommend it.
Article C3486 - August 30, 2008
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
I too was a big fan of Firehand Ember, but have lost the installation execs. I have been using Irfan, and it's ok, but it looks like FastStone is what I'm going to start using exclusively. I had never come across FastStone in my searches, so thanks for pointing it out.
Posted by: Kerry at June 16, 2011 10:01 AMSame here...used Firehand Ember for years and was saddened when it was no longer updated. I switched to Picasa for a while, but never liked it. FastStone is great! It comes real close to being Ember and only differs by adding features that make it better. Highly recommended. Thanks Leo!
Posted by: Enderswolf at September 9, 2011 12:35 PMThanks -- and you can view PSDs which you can't do in the Windows viewer.
Posted by: Mark Tier at January 25, 2012 3:50 AMInteresting item! I have been using ZoomBrowser, which came with my Canon camera.
Can anyone give me any comparison info between FastStone & ZoomBrowser???
Thanx
Posted by: Dick Thomas at January 29, 2012 9:55 AMI, too, have been an Irfanview user for years. Leo's recent article had me look at FastStone and I like it, but I'm far from ready to switch. The beauty of FastStone is: I DON'T HAVE TO 'SWITCH' - I set Irfanview as my external program (in FastStone), and all I have to do is tap my 'e' key and I'm instantly viewing my picture in Irfanview, with those features not found in FastStone - Truly, the best of both programs!
Posted by: Sam77 at February 11, 2012 7:22 AM