FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

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Features

Editor's Rating:
5.0 stars
Average User Rating:
4.5 stars (out of 1113 votes) Rate it!
Downloads:
3,639,436
Operating Systems:
Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98
Additional Requirements:
Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server
Limitations:
No limitations
Date Added:
July 19, 2006
Previous Versions:

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Publisher's description of FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

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, emailing, 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 frames, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF and DNG.

Version 2.6 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, and bug fixes.

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Editor's review of FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

5.0 stars
"A completely free imaging workhorse"

Reviewed by: CNET Staff
Version reviewed: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

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.

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User reviews of FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

Average user rating: 4.5 stars out of 1113 votes
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5 stars

12 out of 17 people found this review helpful

Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

"Excellent program"

by bilal hashmi on July 19, 2006

Pros: it has many features and simple handling

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5 stars

24 out of 26 people found this review helpful

Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

"Excellent Image Browser - Quite Possibly The Best."

by xTerminus on July 21, 2006

Pros: If you're looking for an image browser, no need to look any further, this is the one.

I use Photoshop & The GIMP for actually editing images & IrfanView for the final file compression if it's an image I'm using on a website, but this is my favorite for browsing. It's nice looking & has a variety of skins to choose from. The interface is well functioning with a good layout. It has an excellent & easy to switch between full screen mode with mouse wheel browsing. The program looks very professional & seems highly polished.

I havn't found a better image viewer, although alternatively I use Picasa when I want to browse photos/images without navigating individual folders. However, Picasa is not as good for when I want to browse with full file/folder path control + full screen viewing, hence I use FastStone for this purpose.

Cons: None for what I use it for.

I still use IrfanView for compressing images for my websites though. IrfanView seems to make the smallest file size of any of the graphics programs that I use, even with all settings equal. It's nothing major though, just when working with small files & trying to get the absolute minimal file size for website graphics where some people may be using dial-up.

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5 stars

19 out of 28 people found this review helpful

Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

"Awesome, full-featured"

by JamesWatson on July 19, 2006

Pros: Easy full-screen viewing, lots of functionality, easy cropping, easy color management, easy red-eye reduction, easy, easy, easy but doesn't sacrifice any control.

Cons: No batch fix option to quickly optimize a group of photos that are too dark, or not enough color, or whatever.

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5 stars

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful

Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

"Best and Free"

by skdonweb on August 3, 2006

Pros: It's probably the best free image viewer / editor that is available.

Cons: None

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4 stars

17 out of 20 people found this review helpful

Version: FastStone Image Viewer 2.6

"Great product with precious few faults"

by M Fridholm on July 19, 2006

Pros: This product is very good at doing what it does without hogging your system.

I used to use the picture&fax-viewer because it started fast - even if it stank in all other ways.

This is one of the few image viewers that actually start fast enough to replace the internal viewer and still is competent enough not to irritate you in turn.

Cons: I dislike when programs that are supposed to be almost system tools break the look and feel of the system. FastStone does provide XP-standard themes, but as the method of skinning is different from the system any adjustments or customizations you do to the system look and feel doesn't apply to FastStone.

Other than that the only thing that bugs me is the by-file-name-sorting which fails to count the human way - so 20 is counted as lower than 3 (eg 1, 10, 11, 19, 2, 21, 28, 3... rather than 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 20 etcetera)

These faults are actually quite minor, and in all other respects the viewer is brilliant.

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