CNET Editors' review
Despite its name, FastStone Image Viewer is more than just a program for viewing images. It's also capable of performing a fairly significant number of editing functions, which come packaged in an innovative interface. It's no Photoshop replacement, but we think it's a good choice if you need a way to view images and perform basic editing and correction tasks.
At first glance, the program's interface is a bit cluttered; there are toolbars with lots of buttons across the top, and there are panes where you can navigate to particular directories, view thumbnails of the contents, and view larger previews of individual images. The cool part of FastStone Image Viewer appears when you enter full-screen mode; the image is displayed by itself, but moving your mouse to the edges of the screen brings up a variety of tools and options.
Mouse to the right and the image's metadata appears; to the left, a menu appears with tools for rotating, resizing, and adding text, as well as adjusting colors and adding special effects. Mousing to the top of the screen brings down a thumbnail preview of the current directory, making it easy to select a different image, while at the bottom of the screen there's a toolbar with some of the most basic editing options. We especially liked the program's slideshow feature, which makes it easy to create custom slideshows using your own music.
Although most users should be able to figure FastStone's features out without much assistance, there's a 95-page PDF Help file that offers plenty of guidance. Overall, we were impressed with the variety of features that FastStone Image Viewer combines in an easy-to-use package, and we recommend the program to anyone seeking a basic but well-stocked image editor.
FastStone Image Viewer installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls cleanly.
FastStone Image Viewer - View, edit, and manage images - Download Video Previews:Publisher's Description
From FastStone Soft:
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, e-mailing, resizing, cropping 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 touch 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... It supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA.
What's new in this version:
- Added "Design and Print" (press Alt+P), which allows you to print multiple images with text and effects on one page
- Improved "Adjust Curves". Now you can click and drag in image to adjust the curves directly. Endpoints of the curves are adjustable
- Added "Print Size" option to the Resize tab of the batch convert tool
- Added support of video files to the batch rename tool
- Added "Auto-Resize" option to the image-scanning tool
- Added "Show in Google Maps... See all new features
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All versions:
4.6 starsout of 1,641 votes
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Current version:
4.8 starsout of 6 votes
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My rating:
Write review
Results 1-6 of 6
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"great free program"
Version: FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
Pros
Has all the tools you need.
Cons
No cons at all.
Summary
fast, simply and complete program for show and work with my photos.
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"Easy to learn & use"
Version: FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
Pros
Ready to use, meets all my editing needs!
Cons
None that I can find?
Summary
Instead of paying for 'very costly' software, this is totally free.
Of course, we can always pay a lot of money to own.....? ;-0) -
"Great But STILL No Unicode Character Support!"
Version: FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
Pros
1. It's not just an image viewer; it has many image editing/adjusting tools that work very well.
I actually rarely have to open Photoshop when I have FastStone Image Viewer installed because it can do most the cropping, resizing, converting and adjusting that I would normally do in Photoshop.
2. It's free!
3. The installer doesn't currently try to install any toolbars or anything.Cons
STILL no unicode character support.
It's still not possible to open files in FastStone Image Viewer if there are unicode characters in the file name (such as the characters used in various non-English languages).
This has been the case for years now. I don't know why they're refusing to fix this problem.
IrfanView has a settings option for enabling unicode support so IrfanView is currently my default image viewer.
Also, a minor gripe:
The default viewing mode for viewing images is "Full Screen" when it should be "Windowed View". I think many new users are turned off by the "Full Screen" view and aren't sure how to change the default setting.Summary
FastStone Image Viewer is great image viewer & editor but it STILL NEEDS UNICODE CHARACTER SUPPORT.
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"Great free program!"
Version: FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
Pros
FastStone doesn't update the free version often, but when it does, it just keeps getting better and better. I'm not a professional photographer, but as a rank amateur, FastStone offers me almost all that I need. I've been using it for years, and will continue to do so.
Cons
The only thing missing for me is a dedicated feature to delete the wrinkles from my face!
Summary
Fast, free, and fully functional. What more could you ask for?
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"Only program you need for most photo viewing & tweaking"
Version: FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
Pros
For a small, light, free program, it does almost anything you might want to do to view and edit a photo or other image. There is a lot of power in this little application.
Cons
None at all.
Summary
This is my go-to application for 98% of my work with photos. On vary rare occasions I will need to drop into Photoshop to work with layers on an image or to perform more subtle tweaks or fancy effects.
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"The Best out there."
Version: FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
Pros
Has all the tools you need. Doesn't take over your pictures as some do. Everything from Faststone are great products.
Cons
No cons at all.
Summary
Give it a try, you'll like it.
Results 1-6 of 6
