Software Gadgets

As many of you know, I'm a fan of the Irfanview image viewer. Some people prefer a image viewer than works more like the commercial ACDSee. If Irfanview just doesn't cut it for you, give the FastStone Image Viewer a try. Like ACDSee, the FastStone Image Viewer will let you see a directory full of thumbnails at a time and select an image for full size viewing or editing. It also has a powerful (and fancy) side show feature and a basic image editor.

From the FastStone Image Viewer web site:

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 annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats.

Major Features:

Common image formats support, including loading of JPEG, JPEG2000, GIF, BMP, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO, CUR, TGA and saving to JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, GIF, PCX, BMP, PNG, TGA
Digital camera RAW formats support, including CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF and DNG
Full screen viewer with Select - Zoom support
Crystal clear and customizable magnifier
Resizing, flipping, rotating, cropping, emailing and color adjusting tools
Powerful crop-board that crops images into pre-defined and customized print sizes
Image EXIF metadata support
Batch image converter/resizer
Slideshow with 150+ transitional effects and MP3/WAV/MIDI/WMA background music support
Compare images side by side
Undo, Redo and Mouse Wheel support
Image Annotation (text, arrowed line, watermark etc.)
Simple and effective red-eye removal
Much more

While this program has different features than Irfanview, some of them very useful and quite powerful, I'm not switching -- for the same reason I prefer Irfanview to ACDSee. Both ACDSee and FastStone Image Viewer are more program than I generally need. I just want to look at pictures.

Rating: 4.5 Stars
Operating System: Windows
License: Freeware
Price: Free for non-commercial use
Version Reviewed: 2.5 beta 3
Web Site: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm