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Summary: 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:
•
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
Incredible program! Don't forget it plays music and videos. Click the area with drop-down menu that says "Images". There you will find Images, Videos or Both. Play music while watching a slideshow. You'll love the program!
Posted by: Barry at August 31, 2008 11:29 AMI've been using this for a while. The slideshow feature is awesome! I was going to use PowerPoint or a dedicated slideshow program for a 20 Year Reunion presentation... but I opted to use FastStone Image Vier's built-in slideshow feature. The transition effects are nice and it can automatically display the image name as a caption.
Posted by: James Moberg at September 1, 2008 9:30 AMHi there. I've been using FastStone Image Viewer for several years and I do like it very much. FastStone makes several great programs and one I use fairly often is FastStone Photo Resizer. It will resize your photos (obviously) but it can do so much more! You can use it to convert, rename, manipulate, crop, rotate, etc. You can even add text or a watermark to your photo. An added plus is that it will allow you to do all of the above and more in batch mode. It's fast, efficient and it doesn't suck up a lot of memory while it's running. This combined with the Image Viewer pretty much give you all the basic editing tools you're likely to need.
In short, FastStone anything rocks!
Nelson
Posted by: Nelson Webber at September 2, 2008 7:46 AMLooking at this for my husband to use, and it's frozen 3 times in a few minutes. Any stability problems? Do I need to download extra software for some of the features?
Posted by: Kathy Dennis at September 2, 2008 11:52 AMTo the person below or anybody having freezing or stability problems:
Click on the link that Leo provided, called 'FastStone Image Viewer' - it will take you to the FastStone home page.
Under 'Products', click on the 'download' link. You will then see 4 different versions of the ImageViewer. (ie: exe, exe (site 2) zip and portable).
Click on the 'portable' download link to download a portable zip file called 'FSViewer35.zip'. Once downloaded on your PC, unzip the file and it will create a new folder with the same name as the zip file.
Inside are ALL the portable files. Place the unzipped program folder anywhere on your PC or flash drive.
The program is now yours! With no-installation, there are NO files scattered in your Windows System folders.
Since the program is PORTABLE, this *should solve all your freezing and stability problems. (*Depending [of course] on the stability of your entire PC).
It works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, both 32bit and 64 bit systems. By the way, the viewer does what the 'Resizer' does and much much more. You only need this one program: FastStoneViewer! It's the BEST!
Posted by: Barry at September 2, 2008 1:45 PMI use Irfanview, which seems to have all of the same functions. If anyone uses both, please tell me which you prefer, and why.
-Leo
I think this program is really neat, but I stick with Irfanview because of it's support for EPS and AI images.
Well, in theory. I'm still trying to get that part to work.
Posted by: Ziggie at September 9, 2008 7:38 AMGreetings,
...wow.
I know this article is about FastStone, but thank you for the info on Firehand Ember. It was (and is!) my favorite image viewer and manager ever. I have a license for it, and I treasure it. There's all kinds of great touches, like an image scaling algorithm that makes even VERY scaled up images still look very good. It's blazing fast, and perfect for my needs.
If you know where to download the last version of Firehand Ember, I'd love to know. I have various versions, but I was an idiot and didn't save the download for the most recent of them years ago when I downloaded it, and that makes it hard when changing computers.
I wondered what happened to the company, and while I imagined that they didn't make enough money due to a lack of exposure, I never imagined the truth.
Thanks again; while I didn't know the author personally, I also count it a sad loss to the software industry.
-- Morgan
Posted by: Morgan Schweers at December 6, 2008 2:55 AMI too have used fully licensed firehand products for MANY years and I too am sad to see my favorite image viewer no longer being upgraded or produced. The authors of it were very talented and will be missed. I will definitely give FastStone a try.
Posted by: John at April 18, 2009 5:28 AM--John
firehand ember has been my favorite image viewer for many years -- super-fast and no bloat. i'd always suggested it to my colleagues. thanks leo for recommending faststone. i'm delighted with the features and performance so far and glad to be using a supported product. i'll definitely be offering the author a donation -- and a few suggestions! [j]
Posted by: Jake at May 15, 2009 5:34 AM