FastStone Image Viewer - Powerful and Intuitive Photo Viewer, Editor and Batch Converter

For the longest time I have been using ACDSee 3.1 as my JPG viewer. I first started using it sometime in ‘97 as my quick viewer of choice. However, over time it caught the Swiss Army Knife Syndrome which is apparently very common in the software industry. ACDSee was great at one thing and one thing only…It was one of the fastest lightweight image viewers I’ve seen (back in the day). It rendered JPGs fast. I mean real fast. And then it happened…They added on extra junk that people didn’t really need. The end result ( tried out version 8 ) was that it’s become typical bloatware. It can do lots of things, but it can’t do them well at all. For image editing there’s Photoshop CS. For organization there’s Adobe Gallery and for RAW stuff there’s Phase One and Pixmantec’s offerings which are superb, Photoshop does RAW as well. So, I Googled for an image viewer and FastStone Image Viewer came up. I figured, hey…Great, it’s even free! That’s always a plus. From what I saw in the first few minutes of using it, it’s very cool. Has a lot of nice features and isn’t terribly slow like Adobe Bridge is. Highly recommended…

Categories: Photography, Software
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