Are you looking for a full-featured, freeware image browser with image editor capabilities for Windows XP? Do you need to easily browse all images on your local drives and removable media? Have you been searching for the best way to transfer (a.k.a. download, extract, copy) images to your computer from your Camera, memory-card, or other portable USB media?

Photographic Fullfillment

FastStone Image Viewer offers these great features to rocket your productivity when working with a large volume of images:

• Batch import pictures from your camera (or other location)
• Leverage the speed of a Batch Import by editing any, or all images during the transfer process
• Save each photo to the folder of your choice
• Conveniently select images for e-mailing, and send them without leaving FastStone Image Viewer

If any the tasks in the list above are common to your development work– or even for your personal image collection– then you might take a closer look at the latest image viewer / browser / editor to take the FREEWARE^† software world by storm: FastStone Image Viewer, by FastStone Soft!

With an attractive, skinnable interface, quick startup and responsive feel– even while scanning through tens of hundreds of thumbnails, browsing folder after folder, I’ve not grown weary of waiting for images to load in FastStone Image Viewer, nor do my other programs become sluggish if FastStone is open in the background (which is more than i can say for a few other bulk image management utilities i’ve used).

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What makes it Practical?

FastStone stands out among the other freeware image viewers; image browsers which boast of some built-in editing capabilities in that it is the perfect software to use for editing a set of images in one folder. For example, I had a folder full of Versions of a logo i had been designing. Each image contained a useful area, but also extra material which would need some cropping before it could be used in any production situation. Much to my delight, after I finished cropping the first image of the folder (having planned to crop only that image), I noticed the buttons in the “crop-window” for advancing to the next, or previous image in the directory. Clicking Next, FastStone advanced to the next image while retaining the crop area from the previous image selection. Since each image actually needed to be cropped in the same exact area as that of the first, I was able to blow through that directory, cropping each image precisely as I desired, in a fraction of the time it would have taken to re-select the appropriate section of each consecutive image in the folder. I’m quite sure I’ll take advantage of this feature many more times in the future!

Granted, not every image editing task is going to present itself as a set of nearly identical images, each containing a similar area to be cropped– but the feature is nonetheless a remarkable advantage. The thinking behind this kind of development seems quite intuitive in comparison to some of its software category brethren. Check it out if you’re at all frustrated with your current options. You may be pleasantly surprised.

^†FastStone Image Viewer is free to use for non-commercial purposes. Commercial users who pay the nominal fee (less than $35) to register under FastStone Soft’s Lifetime License agreement are entitled to all available updates, with nothing more to pay, ever!