FastStone Image Viewer

CNET Editors' review

For a free program, this multipurpose image tool strikes us as a good find. Although the main window looks too cluttered at first glance, it's intuitive enough after you get your bearings. FastStone Image Viewer for Windows boasts a nice design already, but you can customize it to your liking with several skins. Clicking a thumbnail puts a larger view of the shot in the lower-left pane, and you zoom in simply by dragging the mouse around. Though its image-editing tools can't compete with those offered by a full-featured suite, there's still enough here to make a decent amount of tweaks to your shots. You can resize, crop, remove red-eye, and adjust color, brightness, and contrast. You'll also find a few simple effects and filters, including Lens, Waves, and Morphs. FastStone Image Viewer for Windows can batch-convert files into a number of popular image formats including GIF, BMP, PSD, and PNG, and the slide-show creator allows you to apply transitions, specify the interval between images, and add your own MP3s as a soundtrack. We can recommend this program to everyone but professional designers.
FastStone Image Viewer - View, edit, and manage images - Download Video Previews:

Publisher's Description

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All User Reviews
  • All versions:

    4.6 stars

    out of 1,620 votes

    • 5 star: 1125
    • 4 star: 367
    • 3 star: 70
    • 2 star: 24
    • 1 star: 34
  • Current version:

    4.6 stars

    out of 42 votes

    • 5 star: 29
    • 4 star: 10
    • 3 star: 2
    • 2 star: 1
    • 1 star: 0
  • My rating:

    0 stars

    Write review

Results 1-10 of 32

  • 5.0 stars

    "very match"

    October 17, 2006  |   By agalvik

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    carefull

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  • 5.0 stars

    "very impressive"

    October 4, 2006  |   By cognoscible

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    So far so good, looks fantastic, great picture presentation, batch conversion works well.

    Cons

    during batch conversion, when changing image size I would prefer to have a choice of specifying the size of image I want, not just the size of file as seems to be the case here.

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  • 4.0 stars

    "Really nice!!!"

    September 27, 2006  |   By williamfantsy

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    it's a really nice viewer,one of the best.Very comfortable to use Full Screen with popup menus,where you can jump to any picture you like and see all properties without leaving Full Screen. Modern look with several skins.

    Cons

    doesn't make exif comments

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  • 4.0 stars

    "Good"

    September 25, 2006  |   By mayurdesai73

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    The option of editing in Full Screen is excellent.

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  • 4.0 stars

    "great tool"

    September 22, 2006  |   By bmkaye

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    everything

    Cons

    nothing

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  • 5.0 stars

    "Better than old, expensive ACDSee"

    September 17, 2006  |   By SouthernSandman

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    Free, easy to install, fast to preview, lots of tools, just fantastic.

    Cons

    Couldn't possibly think of anything right now. Used it for a few months now, and it never even crashed once.

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  • 5.0 stars

    "Out of Words"

    September 14, 2006  |   By John.Moore.

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    This proggie is total dope. You get addicted within 2 minutes. It even beats ACDsee classic in terms of speed and interface.

    CLEAN UI, MANY Functionalities, PERFECT Image rendering, FREE and much much more.

    NO bugs found so far.

    Simply the best image viewing software that I've come across ever.

    Its one of the very few softwares that I can trutfully say would be worth buying if it was commercial.

    Feature Loaded. NO bloatware. Light years ahead from its paying counterparts.

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  • 5.0 stars

    "Best free software I've seen"

    September 9, 2006  |   By TerryT

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    If you are editing photo's from your digital SLR, you may never need Photoshop (or Elements). FS allows extensive edits from my Olympus Evolt 500 raw files, better than the software that came with the camera. It runs slide shows with so many transition options that I will never try them all. It recognizes most image file formats. Scanning through a bunch of event photos (graduation, wedding, holiday) is so easy, as is then saving the best (with edits) to a cd-rom. Unless you are a graphic artist, what more could you want.

    Cons

    You find the menu otions by taking the mouse to each of the four screen borders. Each border brings up different options. They are all there, but you may spend some time finding them. But this program is worth the slight effort, as they are all there somewhere.

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  • 5.0 stars

    "best image viewer I ever used"

    September 7, 2006  |   By iusti2005

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    I like everything about it, especially those tollbars that pop-up when you move your mouse to the edge of the screen in full screen preview mode, they are very useful and really easy to use and they also save you a lot of time

    Cons

    I didn't find any cons so far

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  • 3.0 stars

    "Loves to crash and slowing down"

    September 4, 2006  |   By Minotaurus007

    Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

    Pros

    Has everything you would want from an imageviewer. Like the good old ACDSee classic, but much more powerful without any superfluous things. I like the very strong batch convert/rename/resize functionality.

    Cons

    While working with single pictures is like a breeze, the program obviously cannot handle large file collections.

    I tried to resize 218 GIFs (~26 MB).While having selected the pix for some options I had to restart FSImageViewer. Even after that it tended to slow down as soon as you have those 218 pix selected. What if FS should handle my 10.000+ collections?

    I made a gif-animation with uLead GIF-Animator (218 GIF a 30 kB -> 13 MB Animation). Firefox and IE could handle it, FastStoneImageViewer crashes on different machines with EAccessviolation.

    So don't torture FSImageViewer with Megabytes!

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Results 1-10 of 32

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