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.

The first step after installing the add-on for Microsoft Outlook is to add the photographic equipment to the Equipment Pool. Not only name and type of the equipment can be added but also its serial number, purchase price and date which can come in handy if equipment gets stolen or damaged.

The list can be printed to have a reference in paper form. By default only the name and type of the equipment are displayed when creating a new photo shoot appointment. It is possible to add the other three parameters, purchase date, price and serial number as well.

Besides adding the equipment for the photo shoot appointment one also needs to add a name for it and a client that can be selected from the contact list or created anew.

The installation requires a restart of Microsoft Outlook before the add-on becomes visible.