The current photo viewer on the social networking site has caused lots of controversy since its introduction. Facebook users who did not like the photo viewers interface or functionality at all may be glad to hear that Facebook changes the layout and functionality of the Facebook photo viewer once again.

The company introduced the new features on the official Facebook blog. To sum it up: Three core changes are introduced in the new photo viewer.

Photos can now be shared with a resolution of up to 960 pixels in width, which does not look like much on first glance when compared to the existing solution of 720 pixels. Take a look at the photo below to see the difference in action.

Even better: Despite the increase in size, loading times of photos have been cut in half. Photos on average should load now twice as fast as before which means that Facebook users can access larger resolution images faster on the site.

Photos that have already been uploaded by the user will automatically be displayed in the new higher resolution.

The third and final change is a new photo viewer which on first glance looks a lot better than the current viewer. The new viewer puts the focus on the image. Instead of displaying the image on a black background, it now displays on white which is a lot easier on the eyes.

The clean interface is still displaying comments and other options (like tagging) below the photo on the photo viewer page. Here is a sample shot.

I personally like the new photo viewer and the fact that photos now load faster on Facebook.

The features are currently being rolled out to all users. It make take a few days before you get access to them in your account.

Facebook’s new photo viewer has caused quite the controversy among Facebook users with more than 2200 mostly negative comments about it. There are some that like the new style of the photo viewer while the majority does not like its features at all to say it mildly. When there is controversy there is usually a workaround around the next corner.

There are actually a few things that Facebook users can do to get rid of the new photo viewer. From manual workarounds like reloading the web page (hit f5 in the browser) to Ctrl-clicking (or middle-clicking) the photo to open it in a new tab so that the new photo viewer is circumvented to userscripts like the Facebook Photo Theater Killer.

The userscript basically replaces the new photo viewer on Facebook with the old viewer that is still accessible. It is however not clear if Facebook will keep the old photo viewer up and running indefinitely. The userscript will break the moment Facebook disables the old photo viewer. For now, it is working perfectly.

The Greasemonkey script for now offers the only automatic solution to prevent the opening of photos in Facebook’s new photo viewer.

The script is compatible with Firefox if the Greasemonkey add-on is installed in the browser and Google Chrome if the Tampermonkey extension has been installed.

Users should see no sign of the new Facebook photo anymore after the script has been installed. Previous versions of the userscript showed the new viewer for a split second before the old photo viewer page was loaded.

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox users can download and install the userscript from its Userscripts.org page.

JPEG View is a free Open source alternative. It can, despite its name open several image formats including JPEG, PNG, TIFF or Gif. The photo viewer sports a minimalistic design that hides most features under the surface. The program displays a file browser on startup to pick a single image or folder for viewing.

Most users may want to assign the supported image extensions to JPEG View so that a double-click on an image launches the image viewer directly. The portable software has no options to associated the file extensions with the program automatically, which means users have to make use of Windows to associated the file extensions with the program.

jpeg view

JPEG View displays the selected picture and a set of basic controls once an image has been loaded. The controls at the bottom disappear after some time, and offer standard functionality like rotating the image, loading the next or previous image, loading the first or last image of the folder, displaying EXIF information or switching to windowed or full screen mode.

A right-click displays all available options, and boy, there are lots of them.

image viewer

From batch renaming and copying images, to setting the modification date, displaying various image related information on screen, to enabling auto correction, local density correction, and viewing a slideshow of all images in a folder.

The application loads the images fast. We tested the speed by loading four to five Megabyte images from a test folder and they displayed more or less instantly on our test system.

The only negative aspect is how the settings are changed. The program uses ini files for the settings, and the preferences are changed by editing the ini files manually. That is not the most user friendly way, and might keep inexperienced users away.

Advanced users on the other hand can tweak the image viewer to their liking, from changing the color saturation, sharpening or default color balance, to switching to a windowed startup mode, changing cpu cores usage and the quality of the down sampling filter.

JPEG View is a very fast, and feature rich image viewer for the Windows operating system. The Open Source tool is completely portable, and available for download at the Sourceforge project website.

FastPictureViewer can help you save time. Its aim is to be your first choice for a quick first-pass culling/review of (very) large quantities of images. Once your rough selection is made and you have copied/tagged the images you want to keep, FastPictureViewer has done its job and your usual workflow (Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture NX, DPP, IDimager, IMatch, whatever…) picks up from there as usual. Slashing the initial review time in three is typical, thanks to the speed of everything FastPictureViewer does, viewing, rating, copying, all is virtually instantaneous vs. 1 second here, 2 seconds there, thousands of times, with all competing solutions.

One feature of the photo viewer becomes apparent right after startup: It is incredible fast. It does not really matter if the program is being used to view a handful of images or thousands as the amount of images does not seem to have an impact on the speed of the program. Now we have not tested it with 50+ Megabyte photos but the program loaded our five Megabyte photos as fast as some smaller images that we had lying around.

The photo viewer supports Unicode and international characters which makes it ideal for viewing photos that use non-Latin characters in their file or folder names.

FastPictureViewer Professional displays several objects on the screen besides the active photo. Those are a rating object to quickly rate the active photo, exif information about the mode, focal, ISO and megapixels used to take the photo, a histogram and an external editors object that can be used to quickly load the photo into a photo editor.

All of those information and on screen objects can be disabled if they are not needed. Photos can be scrolled in multiple ways including the mouse wheel, the computer keyboard and by clicking on the thumbnail image of a photo in the thumbnail stripe on top which is only displayed if the mouse is in that area of the program.

The left and right mouse button can be used to zoom into the photo. Holding the button makes it possible to move around in the photo.

The professional version of FastPictureViewer supports a wide variety of image and photo formats, among them all popular formats like jpg, png or tiff but also hd photo, various RAW formats like CR2, CRW, NRW or NEF.

FastPictureViewer Professional offers extensive options to enable or disable features, improve the performance or quality and to configure other settings like the slideshow, plugins or automatic updates.

• Color Management: FastPictureViewer fully supports color management, including support for custom-profiled monitors. A specific profile, to be used when converting the images for display, can be selected in the program options. Is is important to note that FastPictureViewer converts the image data directly from the source color space (the image file) to the destination color space (as specified by the monitor profile) without an intermediate sRGB step
• Image Bookmarking: FastPictureViewer supports 10 “quick bookmarks” accessible from the keyboard or a popup menu. Press Ctrl+Alt+1 to set bookmark 1 at the current image’s location, then later on press Alt+1 to quickly jump back to it.
• Network Support: Network Shares browsing is enabled
• Multi-Monitor support: FastPictureViewer is fully multi-monitor aware and can be displayed on any monitor in a multi-monitor setu
• High-DPI Monitors: FastPictureViewer fully supports 96, 120, 144, 192, 250 dpi screen resolution and beyond (tested up to 480 dpi).
• Adobe XMP and Windows 7, Windows Vista metadata: The program can optionally create/update Adobe XMP sidecar files and optionally write embedded XMP and Windows 7, Windows Vista metadata within JPEG (JFIF), HD Photo / JPEG XR and TIFF containers.
• Keyboard shortcuts: The program supports a wide variety of shortcuts that can speed up the workflow tremendously.

The developer of FastPictureViewer has created three support pages that showcase the advantages of the program for professional photographers, imaging professionals and photography enthusiasts which are the starting point for in depth information.

A video review of the program is available below.

Christmas Giveaway:

We are giving away an unlimited amount of licenses for the next 24 hours. You can download the 32-bit or 64-bit edition of FastPictureViewer below. The program is pre-registered so all that you need to do is to install it between December 21, 12:00 CET and December 22, 12:00 CET.

• FastPictureViewer Pro 32-bit
• FastPictureViewer Pro 64-bit

Users who download the version after the 24 hour period can use the program as a fully working Pro trial until January 31, 2010. It will automatically revert back to a free version after that data.

Raju is giving away licenses for USB Safely Remove.

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.

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.

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.