FastStone Image Viewer
| File:FSViewer.jpg FastStone Image Viewer | |
| Stable release | |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista/2003 Server |
| Type | Image viewer |
| License | Free for personal home use only - Commercial or non-home use requires purchase of the Pro version |
| Website | www.faststone.org/ |
FastStone Image Viewer is an image viewing application for Microsoft Windows. While competing in the same segment as ACDSee, Irfanview, Picasa and others, it features image editing features normally found in full blown image editing tools like Paint.NET or Adobe Photoshop.
As of version 2.7, it is essentially being divided into a "free for personal home use only" version, and a Professional version for commercial customers and those who use the product outside of the home. Those using the product outside the home and/or for anything related to commercial use are required to register and purchase the product, at which time their registration will be converted to the new Pro edition. In addition to the core functionality of the "free" version, the new Pro version will have features exclusive to the paid license. Those are specified in the version 2.7 application help file as follows:
- Compare images side-by-side (up to 4 at a time. Find it in Tools menu)
- Contact Sheet Builder (Put multiple images on one page, fully configurable. Find it in Tools menu)
- Drag and drop to arrange thumbnail orders (Custom Sort)
- Create memorable artistic image montages from your family photos for personalized desktop wallpapers (Wallpaper Anywhere. Find it in Tools menu)
- Supports dual-monitor configurations (Find options in Settings)
General program features include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. The program also focuses on the slideshow feature, which includes a musical slideshow and over 150 transitional effects.
The program supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) as well as the popular digital camera RAW formats.
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 3.2 which was released on April 23, 2007.
Trivia
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 the Free and Commercial versions. This announcement was made on their web site the same date that version 2.8 was posted.
See also
External links
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