Download Faststone Image Viewer

[Krysta Cirilo]

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]

I use Lightroom Classic CC on my laptop/desktop for photo management and editing. My camera is 61mp, so files can be up to 80mb each. Even on my capable desktop, these load slowly for full-screen in Lirbary - 1-4 seconds to fully resolve. (Much worse on my aged laptop.) It's very time-consuming to view and grade images, especially with 500-2000 often-similar images from the day.

I have used this software solely as an image viewer for 15-20 years. Some use it as an editor as well. But I prefer more advanced (paid) software as an editor. But I love it for culling because it displays the image full screen and it is my default viewer when I click on an image attached to an email, etc.

When I click on a raw image n FastStone, I have no idea if I am seeing the converted raw data or the embedded jpg. I suspect it is the latter. But I don't care, because a jpeg is just fine for culling (seeing if a portrait subject's eyes are closed, etc).

The app will display the (generically demosaiced) RAW file if you tell it to and if it's capable of doing so. If you tell it to but it's not capable of doing so, it will display the embedded JPEG instead, without informing you. You can find out by feeding it a high ISO RAW file with lots of noise and/or obvious geometric distortion. If those things are not apparent in the display, you're seeing the embedded JPEG. Also, JPEGs typically display much faster than RAWs.

Been using Faststone Image Viewer for many years now. It is a very capable organiser and viewer, but it has limitations with editing when compared to something like Lightroom. I shoot RAW on a Canon EOS 5DIII and it handles the files very well for viewing, but I seldom use it for anything more than that. These days all my editing is done through Serif Affinity Photo and Faststone can link directly too that.

To its credit Faststone is pretty quick to load and access files - I have about 4TB of images on 3 separate external drives and it can access any quickly. This on a computer running Windows 7 with a Core Duo CPU and 16GB RAM. (Little point in upgrading as broadband is so slow where we live it would spend all its time downloading updates - we would never get on the internet to do anything else!)

"The good man does not use others as a tool." (Kung-fu-tse)

"The only thing certain about life is uncertainty." (Rabbi Berel Wein)

"We must learn to love the man who differs from us in opinion." (Swami Vivekananda)

"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at someone else - you are the one who gets burned." (Buddha)

But still very usefull , I am mainly using it to compare different versions of tiffs coming from my true RAW processors also to cull initially my new RAW pictures and send them to my true RAW processors , by launching program or by copy Paste to an open one

My current Lightroom workflow is star images as Delete - 0 Star - 1 star - 2 Star as a first round, so to be able to quickly view the RAW (or jpeg) images in FastStone and grade them in a way Lightroom can see is all I need.

There's also XnView MP which has star ratings and color tagging, basic editing tools (levels, curves, etc.), runs on Linux / Windows / Mac and is free. However, I agree with others that I use a better bitmap editor for anything above trivial stuff. You can (as with Fast Stone) assign a keyboard shortcut to open the selected file in any one of several programs, so the viewer can function as a dispatcher of sorts.

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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.

When I try to open an image from my faststone image viewer using the "open with"> external program>Photoshop CC..... It opens the image but the image is cut off on one side. I feel like this is a sizing issue, maybe canvas or something related. I have used this method many times before. So, I'm not sure what has changed. Unless my camera setting got changed and is creating too large of a file for photoshop. Anybody have any ideas regarding this? I sure could use some help....Uuuugh(pulls hair)

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:

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