FastStone Image Viewer is an image viewer for Microsoft Windows. It includes a fully integrated thumbnail file manager and a database, so it can also be used as an image organizer. When the program is launched, there may be a delay as the thumbnail view is managed, particularly the first time when the thumbnail cache database is built.

As of version 3.5, usage of FastStone Image Viewer remains cost-free for personal and educational (including non-profit organization) use, while still requiring a registration for commercial use.

Features

General program features include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, batch processing, batch renaming, color adjustments, color space management, lossless JPEG rotations, a thumbnails database and, unused before in image viewers, a customizable magnifier zooming option typically available in accessibility software. The program also sports a slideshow feature, which includes a musical slideshow and over 150 transitional effects, and since version 3.0 features a memory card image retriever.

The program supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA), with a specific centre on popular digital camera RAW formats.

In addition to the core functionality of the cost-free version, the commercial version is said to have exclusive features, such as (described in the 2.7 note):

Comparing images side-by-side (up to 4 at a time)

Fully customizable Contact Sheet Builder

Drag and drop thumbnail order arranging (Custom Sort)

Creation of artistic image montages from photos for personalized desktop wallpapers (Wallpaper Anywhere)

Supports dual-monitor configurations.

However, in version 3.3 all the above mentioned features are included, so it seems that there is no significant difference between a free and a commercial version anymore.

Versions

The FastStone Image Viewer was first released in 2004 by FastStone Soft. Since then, a new stable version of the program has been released every few weeks to few months. The latest released stable version of the program is version 3.4 which was released on November 7, 2007.

Since version 3.1, a multilingual version has been completed available (supporting Simple and Traditional Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish).

This Windows program is provided in three forms: as a normal-install executable, a zip file of the same, or as a fully portable no-install zip file.

According to FastStone, version 2.7 and all previous releases have been found to be using improperly licenced images and icons, and as a result, FastStone requested that version 2.7 and older copies of FastStone Image Viewer cease to be used, with all licenses updated to version 2.8 for both free and commercial versions. This announcement was made on their web site the same date that version 2.8 was posted.

Also, as of version 3.5, Unicode is not yet supported (a shortcoming even ACDSee still suffers from as of version 10).