The program uses a modular approach giving the user the option to enable or disable modules during installation. The program interface has not changed that much over the years which becomes apparent if you look at previous reviews of the program here on Ghacks. But that is not necessarily a disadvantage as it worked and works quite well for the tasks it can be used for.

FastPictureViewer Pro has three core audiences. Professional photographers, imaging professionals and photo enthusiasts. Photographers often have to quickly sift through a folder of photos that they have taken, and FastPictureViewer allows them to do just that. The application can be used to facilitate the first review pass that usually consists of culling or rating. The program uses software decoders provided by camera manufacturers to always stay on top when it comes to image format support.

Additional features worth noting are intelligent preloading of images in memory for faster loading times, full color management and profiled monitor support, as well as plug and play tethered shooting (connecting the camera via USB to a computer or screen to display them in full screen automatically), Adobe XMP rating and Microsoft photo rating support, color-managed Raw previews and metadata support.

Speed and performance are important to all users, but especially so for imaging professionals. The program supports modern technologies such as multi-processing and multiple-cpu cores, hardware accelerated display adapters and advanced memory management. It sets new limits as far as image quantities and sizes go. FastPictureViewer Professional supports very large images, the developers have for instance tested it with a 466 Megapixel images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The program can be used to go through hundreds of thousands of images without noticeable drop in performance.

The bookmark feature allows imaging professionals to save folder specific image bookmarks, for instance to mark interesting images or to save the current review location to continue going through the images at a later point in time.

FastPictureViewer Professional’s support for XMP can be put to use to quickly add rating tags to images. This way images could receive accepted, undecided and rejected ratings with a single key stroke.

What’s New in 2011

When you look at the modifications that Axel implemented in the last year, you will notice some high caliber additions. FastPictureviewer Professional now features a View Filter which can be used to restrict viewing to images of a specific rating or tag (e.g. only five-star photos or photos marked as undecided).

The program’s GPS Metadata support has been improved. A photos GPS location can now be displayed on screen, and users have options to launch Google Maps, Bing Maps, Flickr or Panoramio. Photos can be sorted by GPS timestamps and GPS data can be used in the program’s batch file processing module.

The new IPTC Metadata Editor plugin adds support to write IPTC fields within files or external XMP sidecars.

Raw format support for new camera modiles have been added, as well as support for Photoshop PSD files and CGI formats.

Useful Links

Here is a selection of links that new users and prospect buyers may find useful.

• Supported image file formats
• FastPictureViewer Professional Download
• Getting started and tutorials

Verdict

I’m an enthusiast when it comes to photography. I recently bought a new Canon EOS DSLR and use FastPictureViewer to quickly go through the photos that I have taken. While I could do the same with other image viewers, they usually come with delays in opening new photos. I leave most of the features of the program to professionals though who will make good use of the features.

Continuous support by the program’s developer, Axel Rietschin, ensures that it stays cutting edge.

Giveaway

We have 20 FastPictureviewer Professional licenses to give away. Please leave a comment below to take part in the drawing. If you like, tell us a bit about why you’d like a license for the program.

Many digital camera manufacturers on the other hand have not created codecs that support the framework and both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. That’s where the FastPictureViewer WIC Codec pack comes into play which is a collection of digital camera codecs for about 300 different digital camera models that make use of the framework under 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The codecs are then automatically used by programs that support WIC which includes most of Microsoft’s own software programs including Windows Media Center, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the developer’s Fast Picture Viewer and all Microsoft .net Framework 3 applications.

The digital camera codec pack is currently available as a beta version from the developer’s website. It adds support for the following formats:

• *.tga, *.tpic Truevision Targa (TGA) Supports most format flavors: uncompressed and RLE-encoded grayscale 8 and 16-bit, true color 15, 16, 24 and 32-bit (with alpha) and 8-bit indexed with 15, 16, 24 and 32-bit colormap.
• *.dng Adobe Digital Negative BETA
• *.cr2, *.crw Canon Raw Images BETA
• *.raf Fuji Raw Images BETA
• *.3pr, *.fff Hasselblad Raw Images BETA
• *.kdc, *.dcr Kodak Raw Images BETA
• *.raw, *.rwl Leica Raw Images BETA
• *.mrw Minolta Raw Images BETA
• *.nef, *.nrw Nikon Raw Images BETA
• *.orf Olympus Raw Images BETA
• *.rw2 Panasonic Raw Images BETA
• *.pef Pentax Raw Images BETA
• *.sr2, *.arw Sony Raw Images BETA
• All formats Thumbnail provider for XP Provides support for thumbnail views in Windows XP Explorer, for all the above format variants.

The developer is currently investigating possibilities to add additional codecs to the codec pack. Check out the website for more information.

Fast Picture Viewer Professional was primarily designed for photographers, designer and editors to aid them in their daily work but its core functionality makes it interesting for most computer owners as well. As the name suggests the application is a fast picture viewer with a low memory footprint. Here is but one example for that.

A 2.17 Megabyte jpg image that is loaded into Fast Picture Viewer uses 9.6 Megabytes of computer memory and 12.6 Megabytes of virtual memory. The very same image makes XNView use 48.5 Megabytes of computer memory and 44.6 Megabytes of virtual memory.

The image file formats compatibility page lists the file formats that are currently supported by Fast Picture Viewer. It does make use of the Windows Imaging Component to ensure maximum file format compatibility.

There are a few basic groups that Fast Picture Viewer aims at:

Professional Photographers

• Full Color Management with Profiled Monitor Support
• Plug and Play Tethered Shooting
• Adobe XMP Rating, Microsoft Photo Rating
• Histogram and EXIF Info
• Color-Managed Raw Preview
• Sort on Date or GPS Time
• Watched Folder Mode

Imaging Professionals

• Unmatched Speed
• Browse 100,000′s
• Large Images Support
• Saved Bookmarks
• Multipage MTIFF Support
• Custom Monitor Profiles
• One Key Accept/Reject/Copy
• Deep Subfolder Browsing

And of course the home user who wants a fast reliable image viewer for the images on his computer.

The program’s options contain several features that have to be enabled before they can be used. This includes one-key rating of images, single-keystroke labeling, multi-core support or how file operations like copying or moving are handled.

You will discover interesting and useful new functions all the time at the beginning. A click on the image count of the folder in the lower right corner will for instance display a slider that can be used to jump directly to another image with just two clicks of the mouse button.

Another example is the folder tracking feature which automatically scans selected folders – and subfolders – for new images displaying them as soon as they become available.

Fast Picture Viewer Professional is one of the fastest image viewers out there. Combined with its low memory footprint and professional features it is currently one of the best image viewers that is available for the Windows platform.

To get your copy head straight over to the download section and download the software. Then register the software with the following information. (Make sure to put the key in one line)

username: gHacks.net
key: LPmFPNAcSb4If92TCNGny9qrqLjGfRhz1=qf4C9F4qF=fiW+9SQP10zW9TJpewmPgzTKs8kYNEXb8lAly3fG

The key can be used to register the software so that it becomes the Pro version. This is working from Sunday 10:00 UTC to Monday 10:00 UTC.

So hurry up and let the software developer know what you think of his software.

The author Axel was so nice to send me registration keys for his software program that can be used to turn the free version into the professional version. The professional version supports additional file types which was my only criticism in the previous review.

If you want to grab a registration key for Fast Picture Viewer reply in here with a comment and I send them to anyone who is commenting as long as I have some. The keys are good for one machine only and require activation over the Internet.

That’s a great chance of getting the fastest image viewer out there for free. What are you waiting for?

Update: Keys are out! I send out lots of them and hope everyone who received one has a good experience and writes about it here or directly to the author.

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.

Has most of the features that programs like irfanview have, like thumbnailed view, manipulate settings like brightness and size, flip images and adjust colors. Best of all, its free and fast to use. An alternative to irfanview and xnview.

Update: The Forcevision Image Viewer is no longer available. The developer website has been discontinued and it is likely that the developers have stopped development some time ago. Windows users looking for an alternative image viewer should take a closer look at the excellent XnView.

XnView supports hundreds of different image formats. Even better: The developers release new versions regulary, and it is not only available for the Windows operating system but also for Linux, Mac OSX and various smartphones.

XnView is available here on the developer website.

A second alternative is the Fast Picture Viewer which has been specifically designed for photographers. It is one of the fastest image viewers available. Support is great with support for more than 45 different image formats and more than 370 different camera models and their RAW formats.

Some of the advanced features for photographers and image editors and inspectors are IPTC Editor, RGB histogram, Color Management, EXIF, Tethered Shooting and ultrafast Raw previewing.

Fast Picture Viewer is available as a 32-bit and 64-bit edition for the windows operating system. Windows users should download the cheat sheet in pdf format from the developer website to learn the ins and outs of the image viewer and rater.