So last week I finally got fed up with the limitations of IrfanView. I started looking for another free program that would read RAW files quickly and still have the features that I missed in IrfanView.
During my research, FastStone Image Viewer kept coming up as an option, so I decided to give it a try. And am I ever glad that I did!
Pros:
Fast! I would say it’s every bit as fast as IrfanView.
Can read almost any image/audio/video file under the sun.
Loads RAW previews within a second.
Is very light on system resources. Not quite as light as IrfanView, but still super fast compared to Windows Photo Viewer.
Will move to the next picture after deletion!
Default mouse scroll button action is zoom, not scrolling.
Opens in full-screen by default for the best image viewing
Features a ‘quick zoom’ feature that lets you zoom 1:1 with one click of the mouse button. (Very useful for checking focus etc.)
Features a ‘compare pictures’ window that lets you select up to 4 pictures, then shows them side-by-side so you can quickly compare photos.
Quickly shows EXIF data for the file without having to open a separate program.
It is a full-featured program for editing pictures, you can crop, resize, adjust colors etc. Of course I do that stuff in Lightroom, but sometimes I just need to quickly crop something, and don’t want to fire up Lightroom just for that!
Cons:
I can’t really think of any!
So FastStone Image Viewer has definitely replaced IrfanView as my default photo viewer!
Anyone else have any thoughts on software that they have used?