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.

Head on over to BeFunky to try out the great effects they have! From Cartoonizing to the Warholizer you have 9 effects, and some sub-effects in each. They can all be fine tuned in a lot of ways to give you the perfect result. getting photos is alse really easy, you can upload from your hard drive, get from a URL, get one from your webcam, or even from a photo sharing site.

There is also some gentle comedy throughout the site, from the design itself to some effect descriptions “Patriotic: Ask not what your photo can do for you, but what you can do for your photo”. The light-heartedness, the features and the quality of the effects themselves makes this site a worthwhile visit which takes its rightfull place in my bookmark list. Take a look at me at the Atomium in Belgium below, awesome effect!

I stumbled across loc.alize.us. loc.alize.us is a bookmarklet and website which uses Google Maps for geotagging. It is remarkably simple to use and quite minimalist.

The bookmarklet works through going to one of your photos on Flickr, hitting the bookmarklet, searching for the location using Google Maps, clicking the location and pressing save. Pretty simple, if you ask me! I find this much quicker than Flickr’s service and Google Maps, in my opinion, is much better than Yahoo! Maps.

Their website allows users to explore geotagged photographs, much like the explore option on Flickr’s maps. Once again, the difference is primarily choice. It allows users to use Google Maps, which has much better satellite coverage for example, rather than Yahoo! Maps. Results, naturally, can be refined by user etc.

loc.alize.us allows its maps to be embedded into website. I question the practical uses of this, but it’s still a good idea. I believe Flickr lacks this.

loc.alize.us doesn’t offer anything important that Flickr doesn’t. The key difference is the mapping site it uses; and that’s one big difference!

The site makes creating a video presentation easily: to create one, all you must do is simply upload some pictures, or import them from a website, upload a song, or choose one from their, and finalise it. The presentation can then be shared or downloaded.

Whilst you may think you can do all of this in a desktop video editor such as Windows Movie Maker, animoto does it much quicker, has good production and analyses the sound and pictures and mixes them together to ensure they flow well. Humans have an input too; deciding the order in which to put the pictures, the ability to add text and ability to put more emphasis on particular images.

Slideshows speak better than words, so view mine of my holiday in Poland in 2007.

Unfortunately, animoto has some limitations.

In order to have higher-definition presentations or to make them last longer than 30 seconds, the user must pay. To remove the time limit, it’s either $3/video or $30/year and to allow them to be at DVD quality, you must pay $5/video. This may sound expensive, but in my opinion it’s worth it if you need to put on a good presentation. Only full-length videos (ie those you’ve paid $3 for) can be downloaded.

An application is also available for iPhones so you can view animoto presentations on them.

animoto allows presentations to be shared straight into most social networking sites like MySpace, Orkut and Facebook and images can be imported from Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, Photobucket or Picasa.

(Thanks to Azhar Chougle for introducing me to animoto.)

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 collection centers around five areas called People (Kennedy, Picasso), Places (Times Square, New York), Events (Vietnam War, Winter Olympics), Sports (baseball, football) or Culture (Railroad, Cowboys). It is possible to enter any search term which is usually good enough to find many images related to the keyword.

A click on an image will display a larger thumbnail and additional information about it including the location or date taken. The very same page contains links to related images and an option to purchase it as a framed photograph. A click on the image will load it in full size in a new window.

Image resolutions range from 800×1280 to 1280×1280. Could be a nice idea for a present or as a background wallpaper for the PC.

Google Image Search can also be used to search the Life Photo Archive exclusively by appending the source:life parameter to the search.

Qtpfsgui is such a high dynamic range image creator. It basically takes a set of images in jpeg, png, ppm, pbm or tiff (8-bit) format and transforms them into a high dynamic range image. This works best with identical images of the same scene taken at different exposure levels.

The software program is Open Source and available for Linux, Windows and Apple Macintosh computers. It can also load HDR images directly to edit them in the program’s interface.

The biggest advantage of Qtpfsgui is that everyone can create high dynamic range images with just a few mouse clicks. Advanced users will like the editing options that the program provides but they are not necessary for creating great results.