Download FastStone Image Viewer 4.6

Softworld editor's review - 2011-06-22

Powerful and reliable image viewer

FastStone Image Viewer is an application that allows you to watch pictures in a wide variety of formats. Although the interface of the program looks pretty good it can not be compared with the one that XnView has.

The main widow is well organized. In the left you have displayed the folders from your system and under this there is a box with the preview of the image that you are going to open. The moment you double click on a picture you will manage to see it in full screen mode. What i like a lot about this is that the background color is black.

At first when i watched a picture in full screen mode a thought that there is no menu available. But certainly that i was wrong. You just have to go with the mouse at the top of the screen and a menu will be displayed. This contains basic navigation elements such as arrows, up button, refresh, favorites, options to delete and rotate the picture, slideshow, email and print the selected images etc.

Also on the same bar you have available the general settings. From here you can operate various modification to the viewer, the way how the pictures are displayed in thumbnails, magnifier, associations, favorites, music etc. Also when pointing the mouse at the bottom of the screen another menu of the program will appear and beside that you will also be able to see the desktop bar.

The menu is basically a simple navigation system which is very useful when you want to switch to the next picture, zoom in or zoom out the image and various functions that were also available in the top menu. However when studying a little bit more FastStone Image Viewer I discovered that when watching a picture in full screen mode beside the top and bottom menus you also have available such sections in the left and at the right of the screen.

The one that is displayed at left contains elements such as File and Slideshow, Rotation/Resize and Text, Colors and various effects. In the right one can be found various information about the picture that you are watching such as name, location, size, resolution, etc. To be honest i really like the fact that the image is displayed in such a way. You can see it very clear without any kind of visual aids.

The menus are displayed only when you are pointing the mouse to those specific locations. Returning to the main screen of the application at the top of the window you have basic menu elements such as File, Edit, Colors, Effects, View, Favorites, Tolls, Settings etc. Climbing a little bit down you can observe the same navigation elements that were present in the full screen mode.

This is definitely among the best image viewers. What i like a lot about this application is the way how the menus are displayed when you are watching the picture in full screen mode. However there a couple of drawbacks. Despite of the fact that the application was tested on a pretty powerful machine it ran rather slow. Also the main interface is not the best looking.

FastStone Image Viewer is definitely a great application. If has a couple of aspects that are not so great but overall this is an excellent product.

Good:

-excellent menu system in full screen mode
-lost of great options available
-handles a wide variety of file formats

Bad:

-the combination of colors that is used in the main window is not the best
-runs slower compared with the competition

Version 4.5 reviewed on: 22 Jun 2011

Publisher's description

An image browser, converter and editor that supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO, TGA and camera raw files.

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, retouching 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 touches 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 (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, PSD, EPS, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF, ARW, SR2, RW2 and DNG.

Changes on the new version:
Improved the "Acquire Images from Scanner" tool|Other minor improvements and bug fixes.

Available Translations: