FastPictureViewer is an award-winning image viewer for the Windows platform, specifically Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. It was designed and developed in Geneva, Switzerland by Axel Rietschin, building upon 15+ years of experience in industrial imaging software engineering. FastPictureViewer is one of the first 3rd party HD Photo / JPEG XR image viewer, ready for the next generation digital cameras with native JPEG XR support.
Still it is a small and fast image viewer. It supports rating and copying images on the fly, as you view them either in windowed mode or full screen.
The program was designed for photographers, editors or anyone needing to quickly review, label and rate large amounts (thousands) of digital photos on a regular basis. Saving you time while doing it.
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.
The free version only supports JPEG and HD Photo / JPEG XR (HDP/WDP/JXR) image formats, while the commercial version supports plenty more.
POX added FastPictureViewer as alternative to Oculante
POX added FastPictureViewer as alternative to FlowVision
pefado7045 added FastPictureViewer as alternative to PhotoQuick
mialu0802 added FastPictureViewer as alternative to Nero Photo Editor
Comments and Reviews
I've yet to find a faster image viewer - especially with color management.
The program is disappointing in many aspects, there is no wheel zoom, no thumbnails size adjustment, not enough formats supported, no image processing of any kind, not even negative filter, no dynamic zooming, nothing. The interface is a mediocre and the speed isn’t as fast as touted, it requires a good video card to run well, otherwise, be prepared for errors
Of course, most of the speed comes from utilizing modern graphics hardware, but also modern Windows APIs. If you don't have any of that, you're not gonna be impressed. IMHO, if it could be done without that, others would have already built something as fast.
The interface is streamlined and you get the most out of it by using hot-keys. Just like in Photoshop.
[Edited by DanMan, August 19]
Reply written Aug 19, 2012
FastPictureViewer is fast, stable, and no-nonsense. There are features I wish it had though, like being able to see in-focus areas via highlighting (similar to FastRawViewer). Also, I wish it had a grid or survey view similar to other applications, so that it's easier to compare more than one photo.
Can you view images full-screen, completely hiding the interface and just use key presses to flip between them?