Faststone Image Viewer Windows 10

[Jennell Venier]

FastStoneImage Viewer is an image viewer and organizer software for Microsoft Windows, provided free of charge for personal and educational use. The program also includes basic image editing tools,[3] like cropping, color adjustment and red-eye removal.[4]

Upon release, the software site SnapFiles rated it five stars out of five.[6] It also received five stars by the editor of Download.com.[7] A PCWorld magazine review of version 4.0 of FastStone Image Viewer in 2011 noted the software's "lightning-fast" display of pictures. The reviewer felt that one of its greatest advantages was its "wide variety of file formats" the software supports.[8] Rick Broida of CNET wrote in 2015 about version 5.4: "This freeware gem remains an essential download for anyone looking to view, edit and organize their photos." Broida thought that it was a "bit more robust" compared to IrfanView.[2]

It is definitely something in your setup, I use Faststone to Affinity Photo as my workflow (for 5 years) and it works flawlessly. You need to add AP in the edit in external program dialog, it must point to the exact program path on your drive.

Did you see my previous post where there is a screenshot with the configuration of the external program in FastStone? Either set up your app the same, or as Walt already wrote, show a screenshot of your setup.

Hi, sorry to jump in on this conversation, but I've just recently put Affinity 2 and faststone image viewer on my PC (finally ditched Adobe) I found this conversation as I'm trying to link the 2 together so I can edit using external program, I've gone into settings but can't fathom out how to do it, can anyone give me step by step guidance please ?

Hi, OK open Faststone, go to Settings from top bar next to Help, Click on Programs when open click ADD button, I am on Windows so I go to C drive Program files, Affinity, open Affinity/Photo and down at the bottom you should see Photo Application click on that and open when box pops up just click OK. Russ.

Yes, that's the principle of MSIX installation, which complicates the external launch. For these cases it is therefore advisable to use MSI/EXE installation (this is mentioned many times on the forum).

I must be an old fogey, because I can't stand the look of the default FastStone window. But it only takes a couple of seconds to change FastStone's skin (Wikipedia definition, opens in another window). When first installed, FastStone looks like this:

I change to a square window by going under Settings / Skins where I choose either XP Blue, Vista, or Steel, but it's all a matter of personal taste ... try the different choices and see which you like. Lately I've been using Windows Steel. I'm sure the fact that I like square windows says something about me :)

Update: 4/27/2012: When we first wrote these tips on using FastStone in the spring of 2009 version 3.8 was just about to come out. Now it's 2012 and FastStone is up to version 4.6. There are a lot of new features that Joe and I need to document when we get a chance. I just looked through all the settings tabs, and I can't see anything that has changed on the settings tab. One thing that has changed are the skin choices which are now:

The defaults are really pretty good, any changes are a matter of personal preference or to make FastStone work better with your hardware (in particular your pointing device). We can look at some of these options in more detail later, but for now let me just point out the options I've changed:

The thing to remember is that if you're saving images to e-mail or use on a web page, you want to use a JPG Quality of about 70. If you create a lot of web pages, you might want to change the setting here to 70, otherwise, go with the default of 90. The other setting you might want to change is "Use Quality from original file", but again I usually leave it checked here and override as necessary.

JPG Quality is another way of talking about how highly compressed an image is when stored. Each program has it's own way of measuring compression, or quality. Photoshop uses a scale of 1-12 and names a few of them: Photoshop calls 10 Maximum, 8 High, 5 Medium, and 3 Low. As you see FastStone uses a scale of 1-100. Original, best quality, images from one of my cameras have a quality of 98 on this scale. The table below shows the file sizes of a single image saved at different Quality settings using Photoshop and FastStone:

Compression will vary from image to image, but the numbers above are somewhat representative. (Although my experience is that normally FastStone does a better job of compressing than Photoshop, and images compressed with a Quality of 70 in FastStone are usually smaller than one saved from Photoshop with "Low Quality (3)".)

Bottom Line: I never use a quality of less than 60 in FastStone. On medium size images I can start to see compression artifacts with quality of 55 or less. On small images I can sometimes see them with a quality of 60, so that's why I usually go with 70 when I want fairly highly compressed, but still good looking, images.

I typically batch convert my RAW files to JPG for viewing, so when I'm in a folder with RAW files I'm typically just looking at thumbnails to pick images. Therefore, I tend go with the default (the embedded image). If you let FastStone convert the RAW file for viewing, it takes several seconds to view the next image (instead of being able to view it almost instantly like we're use to in FastStone).

FastStone can batch convert RAW files to give you JPGs for viewing. (Currently I use Nikon Capture NX2, but it's a lot more expensive than FastStone; there are also other good RAW converters including Bibble, which I use to use, and Adobe Bridge.) If you do use FastStone for batch RAW conversion you might want to consider the high quality color option ... since I don't use this feature, I can't say if it's worth the extra time or not. If you do some tests, let me know the results.

If you don't have a second monitor, you can't get to this tab. I use two monitors, and usually use the "Preview" on second monitor option (but not always). As for the second choice, that's totally a matter of preference depending on your monitors. For example, the second monitor on one of my computers is a projector and I always want the slide show to run there.

Personally I associate another FastStone product, MaxView, as the default program for opening any image; therefore, I use the default (Select None). If you don't have MaxView, I would recommend you "Select All" and let FastStone Image Viewer be the default program for viewing images.

Normally to add the current folder to your Favorites list you would use the Favorites Icon on the Tool Bar. Use this dialog box to organize your favorites by selecting one and moving it using the up and down arrows. You can also delete an individual one by selecting and using the Remove bottom or you can delete all of them with the Clear button.

The power of using FastStone to view and organizing images is that with a single key stroke (E or Alt+#) you can work on the current image in any graphics program of your choice. As you can see, I setup Photoshop as my primary editor (top program in the list, accessed by the letter E). Because I sometime demo working in Elements I also add it as another Editor. My third external program is FastStone MaxView because sometime I want to keep and image open (in MaxView) while I switch to another folder in FastStone Image Viewer (because it is the 3rd external program, access is via Alt+3). Other external programs I use are Qimage for printing and Capture NX2 for RAW conversion and keyword tagging.

Add external programs by using the Add button and finding the .exe program (usually under manufacturer's name in the Program Files folder ... don't be confused by what you see above, I install programs differently on my machine (I install all graphics programs in a Graphics folder that I can access from other machines on my network).

This is where you organize music for use Slide Shows. You can either add tracks here or by using the shortcut in Slide Show Builder which takes you to this screen. You can remove tracks by highlighting them and using the Remove button, or reorder them by using the up and down arrows.

However, if you've managed to read this far, I assume you understand English and will probably want to stick with the default. If you do change the Language, FastStone will restart and both the Tool Tips and the Help will be in the requested language.

It's been a while since I've used it (and I don't have a Windows box handy to test on) but I remember using an image viewer called JPEGView. From memory, I seem to recall it supporting the feature you need most: refreshing the display when the source file changes. In any event it is one of the few open-source image viewers for Windows that I found to holds its own.

It has a few extra tricks up its sleeve like the ability to slideshow a folder of images and do quick on the fly basic editing, but its real claim to fame is the lightweight interface that stays out of your way.

Sumatra PDF, though mainly used as a PDF reader, DJVU reader, and EPUB reader, can also open most image formats and automatically refreshes the document view, without locking the document if any other program is processing it. Quoting its web page, it opens:

Okular is a document viewer that opens pdf, djvu, jpeg, png files, perhaps even more. It's a KDE app, since KDE is cross-platform, you may give it a try.Expect a big download though. On the other hand if you plan to use it on Linux, it should be pretty easy to get it up and running.

This may be a bit unconventional but Sublime Text does this quite nicely. I haven't tested it with many file formats, but it's working for a PNG file just fine. In my particular case, I need it to update a python plot as I change it.

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