Fast Picture Viewer is the fastest picture viewer that I come across. It will replace my current viewer XnView. I have a few tests that every new image viewer has to master so that I can judge its speed and functionality. The first is a directory with thousands of images and the second a directory with dozens of large digital camera pictures (each above 4 Megabytes in size).
There was virtually no delay when viewing those images which I have always experienced before. Each image viewer that I tried had a small delay when displaying those large 4 Megabyte+ images.
Startup is very quick as well. Fast Picture Viewer comes with a slick design and runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and most likely Windows Server 2008 as well.
While designed with speed in mind Fast Picture Viewer has several additional interesting features that make it stick out of the crowd of image viewers. The basics first. Users can integrate the software program in the shell, make it the default image viewer for file types and load files directly from within the interface.
The mouse wheel scrolls the images of the directory forward or backward and a click zooms into the image. Several keyboard shortcuts are available for mouse-less navigation. It has a Keep / Copy Folder function that provides a great method of copying selected images to that folder with just the keyboard.
The software program supports both Adobe XMP and Windows Vista metadata creation and update which fuels a rating feature where users can rate images on the fly.
The only thing that might keep someone from using Fast Picture Viewer is its lack of support of image formats. The free for personal use edition supports the JPEG format (*.jpeg, *.jpg, *.jpe, *.jfif, *.exif) and Microsoft HD Photo (*.hdp, *.wdp) / JPEG-XR while the professional version adds support for other common file types like png, tiff, bmp and RAW format previewing and is sold for $29.99 which is a reasonable price for such a fast software.
Another point of criticism could be that it concentrates solely on image viewing and that it does not offer image organizing or editing features. I do not need and miss those features on the other hand but some users might.
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13 Responses to “Fast Picture Viewer”
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[...] de imágenes muy comprometedor en uno de los blogs tecnológicos e ingleses más populares, Ghacks. Se llama FastPictureViewer, y se caracteriza en primer punto por ser bastante rápido, aunque [...]
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[...] was very impressed by the Fast Picture Viewer application that I reviewed earlier today. It was the fastest image viewer that I tested so far and [...]
Only jpeg?? That may explain good speed but is way too limited. Unless you only have jpegs. :)
Overall seems similar to FastStone MaxView.
It lacks a lot of features, I’ll stick with XnView. But Fast Picture Viewer is really fast, so if speed is the main concern, it’ probably a good choice.
Martin you are playing the problem down here, when I saw the format page I went “lol wut?!” If you believe the chart (creator made it), the free version can only open jpeg. Also ACDsee does the same without the you can only open jpeg thing: http://screencast.com/t/foDJCAHsIVj
My favorite thing about XnView is that I can view both pictures and movies from the same directory. I take both pictures and movies with my digital camera, so this is a key feature. Can Fast Picture Viewer do this?
I’m using XnView too, i will give i try on this.
FPV is not a general replacement for XnView or anything else, but if you need to rate images, check histograms, to sort the best ones from the rest (and do it quickly), then XnView, ACDSee or FastStone MaxView just won’t cut it (no rating and/or no histogram, can’t be worked around, uh?), so it has a place, among digital photographers at least. Besides that it supports Unicode and the speed is addictive :-)
Martin, thank you for the review!
Fast Picture Viewer is really Fast! I used to view picture with Microsoft’s default picture and Fax viewer because of its spped, but I think this can be a viable alternative. The only thinng, as others commented, is the lack of format support in free version
hi , i would like to rcv a registration key for this product so i can try other formats of images. please
i am interested to see how this stands up against my current favorite – the very fast and very free FastStone MaxView.
Martin
Like you, I have been using Xnview as a general purpose image viewer for a number of years, and I also find its flexible printing options very useful. It does fall down when stepping through a folder of large files, which is s-l-o-w.
Fast picture viewer does exactly what it says. I am very impressed so far, and it will certainly stay on my machine.
I would be grateful for a registration key if you still have one left.
Hi, I had seen your blog, its very interesting and more helpful You might also want to try the free inzomia image viewer, http://www.izview.com. It does what you expect from a picture viewers do but it has a really outstanding zoom feature and it is very fast.