Rounding Off Breed’s Graphical Suite With a Worthy Image Viewer
I’ve been looking for a good graphics viewer. FastStone Image Viewer is a very functional freeware product. It is quick to lode, easy on the resources, provides a fast and effective way to navigate through your photos, gives you a way to do some basic editing, and it provides a utility for renaming and/or resizing your photos in batch mode! You can’t ask more from an image viewer. Except… maybe they could add a way to export photos to some of the online organizations like Flicker or Photo Bucket but I’m not complaining because FastStone image viewer packs a lot of features into their viewer while keeping resources in check and ‘load time’ acceptable.
If you are not a ’shutter bug’ and don’t do much graphic editing, this one program will do everything you need. However, for those of us who like to experiment with our photos and design graphics for applications and web pages, there is a need for a more robust graphics editor and I’ve covered those requirements in a previous post. With the addition of the FastStone Image Viewer I think we’ve nailed down the best free suite of graphic image editing and I would compare it to anything on the market.
When you go to FastStone’s download page, you will notice there are 2 other products that might sound interesting to you; the Photo Resizer 2.4 and the MaxView 2.1. Both programs are components that were rolled up and used to build the Image Viewer. So all the functional abilities in those products are rolled up into the Image Viewer.
http://www.faststone.org/download.htm
August 28th, 2007 at 3:55 am
How does it compare w/ IrfanView?
August 29th, 2007 at 10:04 am
I used Irfanview for years and liked it very much. I still think it’s a good product but FastStone’s Image Viewer Does everything IrfranView does and much more. To be fair, it is a little heavier on resources but it boots up fast enough so you can always shut it down when you are not viewing images. The batch rename and resize functions are really handy tools and the image editing abilities are pretty strong for a viewer. If you use IrfranView and try this out I think you’ll be as impressed and pleasantly surprised as I was. Try it out! and thanks for the comment!!