Every operating system under the sun comes with an image viewer to view image formats that are stored on the computer’s hard drives, connected devices or other storage devices. The differences between one of those standard image viewers and a professional program like FastPictureViewer Professional become obvious immediately when you run the programs side by side. Speed is obviously one of the factors that plays a role. Digital cameras nowadays produce bigger images that take longer to load due to their size.
FastPictureViewer Professional has that speedy edge that makes it the faster solution on computer systems of all speeds and sizes. This may not be obvious when opening 100 Kb photos or images on the system, but definitely when you are working with RAW images or large photos that exceed the Megabyte mark.
But FastPictureviewer Professional is not just an image viewer. It has been primarily designed to aid photographers improve their workflows. Culling plays an important part in the workflow for instance, which is the initial selection of photos to keep and photos to trash or archive. Imagine having to analyse hundreds of 25 Megabyte RAW images on a computer system. A fast and optimized photo viewer can speed up the workflow tremendously.
Alex Rietschin, the developer of FastPictureViewer Professional, mentioned that his program has been designed for four main purposes:
- help quickly review many images efficiently (check overall composition, exposure, sharpness…).
- allow the user to rate and label images according to their subjective “value” (or flag them for deletion).
- copy, move or delete photos, one by one or in batch, according to the given rating or other criteria.
- quickly export web-ready small or medium size JPEG copies of some or all of the photos.
For that, the software program offers professional color managed solution with profiled monitor support, efficient computer resource usage and support of technologies like gpu acceleration or multiprocessing) and optimized interface with keyboard shortcut support for core functions.
Unlike other image viewers, FastPictureViewer displays four transparent floating windows in the picture viewer interface. They are the XMP Metadata window which shows XMP rating, label and urgency, a RGB Histogram window, an external program launcher window and the EXIF Metadata window which displays shutter speed, aperture, dates and more.
The floating windows can be hidden easily by right-clicking on their interface and selecting to hide them. The final element on the screen is the taskbar, which can be hidden as well by pressing F12 to use all of the screen space on the monitor. Another handy shortcut is the F10 key which hides or shows all floating windows at once. Window positions are automatically saved and restored between sessions. One interesting feature is the ability to move the floating windows out of the program window. This is handy for users with multi-monitor setups for instance as it is now possible to view the main interface on one monitor and the floating windows on another.
The taskbar holds access to several important features. A right-click on the taskbar displays a menu with options and their corresponding keyboard shortcuts.
Here it is possible as well to hide or show floating windows, including a View Filter window that is not displayed by default on the screen.
The options on top of the menu require additional explanation.
- Publish, allows to mark images for web publishing or ftp publishing. The module has not been fully integrated yet, but the information can already be used in batch processing the images. Images can be marked for publication by pressing P.
- Batch Delete, will process all images that have been marked for deletion. Images are marked for deletion by pressing X, and the batch delete command can be accessed from the menu or by pressing Ctrl-X.
- Quick Bookmarks offers to bookmark images to open it quickly at a later time.
- Plug-ins, the program can be extended with plugins. A powerful plugin already included is the FastPictureviewer File Utilities plugin which supports rule based processing of images. This is a very powerful plugin, interested users can find out more about it here.
As an example, let’s say we are at the end of a long review session during which we viewed and rated thousands of images. Now we want to copy all files that were given a 5 stars rating to a folder, say D:\Images\Keepers\5-Stars.
The plugin can do exactly that.
- Rename is another powerful renaming tool that supports templates. The file renaming section at the FastPictureviewer website offers a tutorial on the module.
Those are just some of the features of FastPictureViewer Professional. It offers many additional features like a tracking mode where the program monitors an image folder to always display the latest created image stored in that folder on the screen or a tethered mode which can be used to display images directly from the digital camera. Everything has been designed to improve the workflow of photographers, and it does not really matter if they are professionals or amateurs.
Another handy feature is the external editors window which can link to external applications so that images can be send to those editors easily.
The best option for new users of FastPictureViewer Professional is to take a look at the getting started guide on the official homepage. It is lengthy but covers the basics and offers lots of tips on how to work with the program.
FastPictureViewer Professional is at its core a very fast image viewer. If you look deeper you find a professional tool for photographers, editors and photo enthusiasts to manage images on the computer system. The software is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.
FastPictureViewer Professional Video
FastPictureViewer – Part 1: Introduction from fpvpro on Vimeo.
FastPictureViewer Professional Giveaway
Axel was nice enough to provide us with 20 FastPictureViewer Professional licenses. Please let us know what you’d like to do with the program in the comments for a chance to win one of the licenses. Interested users can download a fully working trial version of the program at the developer site.
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I’ll use the the fastpicture viewer to review my photos out of the cam – compared with the alternatives it’s an incredibly fast tool even to view raw images.
Thanks
Count me in.
To have the ability to work with RAW images.
Thanks!
Hi, waitiing for this giveaway since last christmas giveaway on Fast Picture viewer. I formatted my laptop in March and lost this application along with the formatted laptop.
I will use this application in viewing and collecting my pictures which is large in files. Besides that, I wish to upgrade my currently used free edition to the professional license.
This application is great when viewing large volume of pictures while the pc keep smooth without any lacking. This is the experience i got since use it last christmas.
Thanks.
I would like to use the FastPictureViewer Professional program to view and manipulate images quickly.
This is notice of my intent to be entered into the FastPictureViewer Professional Giveaway.
This is a great program, well structured and very fast. I have used the trial version previously. It excels at rapidly going through a huge collection of pictures and selecting or sorting. I will put it to good use in developing a book on family history. Thanks for offering it.
I work with a non-profit sports organization for native indian hockey in kamloops canada
Each year we hold a tournament (about the middle of january) for the NHL (native hockey league)
:-)
I do booklets, pamphlets and score cards for the tournament. Photo editing and viewing programs are helpful for our non-profit work.
Please consider me for a licence, thank-you
And Merry Christmas – Happy holidays – to everyone!
I would use this program to view my family and pet photos, and on the side some naked women but not mostly.
All I have for image editing is an old copy of PaintShop Pro 5 and I would like something better to work with the family photos.
I am scanning in 2000 family photos with my parents and would love this software to help me quickly organize and rate them all. :-)
FastPictureViewer Professional offers a very efficient way
copy selected pictures while viewing to another folder.
Hello! I’m a photographer and I often need quick viewing of files from CF and SD cards. FPV is the best program for this also it can quickly zoom any area on the foto.
I need FastPictureViewer every day because I work in the studio. Today I use XnView.
Well, I’ve been using the free version since last xmas.. a pro-version would be nice ;)
I am a big fan of the freeware version of FastPictureViewer since some months now (a really great software) and would like to use the pro features like deleting bad pictures and rating the good ones.
Your christmas giveaway would be ideal for working through the thousands of pictures from my last vacation.
After my last holidays I’ve had over 3000 raw pictures on my sd cards. a friend told me about fpv and he said it should be pretty fast in viewing raws. so i’ve tried the free version, but it doesn’t have raw support. Therefor getting one of the licences would be really great =)
i would sort all my images
It is the best offer! Ghacks always makes me glad.
I would use FastPictureViewer Professional for my big photo collection. No other programs have such an amazing speed.
Mən sizin blog kimi
I’d like to use this software to quickly see my raw images.
Many graphics programs can not properly displayed raw images (especially free ones)… in addition to viewing the images slowly.
Instead FastPictureViewer Pro is very fast and works very well.
Oh, thanks! Count me please.
I would like to tidy up my photos collection.
I’m using FPV from Ghacks Xmas 2009 Giveaway. I want to reinstall the system but then FPV will be lost.
So a true license will be appreciated!
Hi Martin, thanks for another wonderful giveaway. It would be nice to win a license, maybe I could improve my amateur photos. Thanks in advance. Best regards.
This is “THE” most blazing fast program to view pictures with when you have some decent CPU/GPU, unfortunately the free version is no more.
I’ve sent a few bugreports to Axel some months back wich he resolved very quickly making FPV even faster, in fact superfast on 64bit platform.
Anyone dealing with pictures should be interested in FPV, an exellent program to view/filter/organize.
Many thanks Martin & you to Axel.
Being surrounded by frenz all the time and visiting places regularly means Taking a LOT of snaps. Looks like this tool would prove to be very handy when it comes to managing them.
Thanks for sharing the Info gHacks.
I have a lot of JPEG files. FastPicture viewer will help me to sort out them.
Well, it the best giveaway i could think. There is no software that can read RAW images so fast. So I will use it for viewing and may be editing (if the feature exists) .NEF images.
Finally! I’ve been hoping this software would be included in this year’s Christmas giveaway too…. Lately, I have been venturing into the wonderful world of RAW, and this program was quite useful in sorting through a day’s photos. But my trial version just expired….
ICO, JPG, GIF etc.
I like FPV because it is the only viewer that can go through subfolders. Good luck to all!