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.

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Importing new photos into the application can be done easily. The user can use the navigation pane on the top left side of the application to select folders that contain images from his hard drive or use the Import function to pick folders that way. Photos that get imported are automatically categorized and sorted. It is for example possible to browse the photos by year after importing them.

Some categories like the rating category are empty at the beginning and will be filled when the user begins rating photos in the library. One interesting category is to view the images by equipment model which would be really great for photographers who use different equipment for different purposes.

Other options include to view photos by copyright holders, software, exposure time, flash and about a dozen more categories.

Images can be viewed as thumbnails, image strips, slideshows, single images, flip-book like or on a map that is showing their geographic location. This photo software has so many functions that it is hard to keep an overview over all of them.

One feature that is missing are those basic image editing functions that most other image viewers posses. It is not possible to resize an image and save it on the computer afterwards.

Pictomio raises the bar for other image viewers with its beautiful interface and image viewing functions. It does lack behind in image editing options and suffers a little bit from the amount of functions and features the developers have packed into the interface.

There is another drawback. Beauty has its price and users who like Pictomio simply because of its looks will have to cope with a much higher computer memory consumption as in related image viewers.

Pictomia is available for Windows XP and Windows Vista in version 1.0 and as technology preview version 1.1 which includes the Pictgeo software add-on which adds geotagging to the photo viewer.

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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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