Faststone Image Viewer And Editor

[Edilma Howard]

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'm searching for a photo editing software that is similar to Faststone Image Viewer. Since I need to find something that works on a Mac, simple to use and can resize photos in the software along with other photo editing tool and then I can save without having to use another program to resize and then save. The Photo app that came on my Mac is not sufficient and I'd like to find something comparable to Faststone Image Viewer (works on Windows only ) which has a lot of tools and its free.

The software Faststone allowed me to resize a photo and resave in my library. What I see with Photos is you are exporting with only the options small, medium,large which has no correlation that I can find within the Help feature. Many times sending photos through email has a limit in sizing.. I'd like to be able to resize and save the resized image in the photo library. This also saves file space. Also, Faststone has tools which allow you to heal, obscure and add text to the image along with many other tools. It is most import for me to have resizing within the program and not as an export. And its free.

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. It has a nice array of features such as image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, color adjustments, musical slideshow and much more.

then there is size with 5 setting from small to full sized and then custom - small, Medium, high and full sized are various pixel sizes from small to actual and custom lest you set the exact pixel dimension of the larges side

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 one of 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).

With embedded jpg aka fast preview it works well. But I want to see the full raw preview. That's where I get black screen. I'm shooting compressed raw. There is a big capacity different between both and I rarely see the benifit of uncompressed raw in my Fuji x-t20

Although initial caching time of bridge is slow. It's working fine with my specs. Since FIV is free just wanted to give a try and I was unsuccessful. I think it's something related to my system or setting which I cannot find it. I decided to stick with bridge workflow now.

FastStone Image Viewer is using raw processing code from 2018 (DCRAW from Dave Coffin), and that code doesn't support newer raw encoding schemes.

A separate question is if the DCRAW rendering they are using is adequate for culling raw files.

Yes I heard about uncompress raw has support for more softwares. But in Adobe bridge which I was using from the beginning I didn't see any advantage for the size increase. If I remember correctly file was 50-80 percent more in size.

AFAIK Fuji compressed raw is lossless, so what is not raw?

Another thing is that some apps cannot read these files and apparently Faststone is one of those. Yous gets what yous pays for, I guess .

all good my bad, id opened 2 different raw files ,so i re checked to make sure i opened up the same one in both programs and they are the same.

fast raw viewer is much faster opening full size raw files its instant on my computer. but for a culling and image viewer i like the pop out panels on faststone if im culling images i need full screen and the straight into ACR , and the quick tagging and saving into folders is great not forgetting batch processing for my web orders super fast and efficient. but i have been using fast stone for a long long time.

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:

3a8082e126