Software Review: FastStone 4.0

Since the digital camera era began, I've made approximately 65,000 photographs with three cameras. I shudder to think what that number of prints would have cost in the film era. I doubt that I made over 3,500 photographs in the film age with Kodak and Polaroid cameras, the Canon FX I bought in college, and the AE-1 I had in later years. It was simply too expensive to make a lot of photos.

When I started shooting with my first digital, a 2 megapixel Kodak, I got into a nasty habit. I kept everything. Most of it was crap. As newer, better digital cameras came into my hands, the CDs started stacking up. Then the DVDs came along. I knew I was in trouble in 2009 when I converted the CD archive to DVD and they stacked to the top of a 50-disc spindle.

I converted the DVD archive to two 1 TB external drives in 2009. I've been sorting through the archives and throwing photos away since, as I keep adding new photos. The process of getting rid of the bloat was grindingly slow with Explorer, View NX, or PaintShop Pro, particularly when working with a directory containing a large number of files. It seemed to me that there had to be a faster, better photo organizing program than what I was using, so I performed a search for free photo software. One of the search results was FastStone Image Viewer 4.0. I compared it to a half-dozen similar products, and decided it was worth a try. I could always uninstall it if it wasn't what I needed.

The FastStone user interface resembles Windows Explorer, with the addition of a preview pane below the directory tree. When I started working with the program, I immediately found the resizeable preview pane useful. FastStone is truly fast, cataloguing thumbnails and displaying full screen views at speeds that make Windows Explorer and Nikon's ViewNX look quite laggardly. It does move a bit slow when deleting a group of files, but more than makes up for it with the speed of all other operations.

When you want to display a full-screen version of a photo, double-click on the thumbnail. The full-screen versions of photos load very quickly, and a minimal amount of photo data is displayed in the upper left corner of the screen, as shown above. To change the photo displayed in the preview pane, click on the desired thumbnail.

To display thumbnails click on the thumbnail button on the toolbar as shown above.

To display the report view, click on the Report View button on the toolbar as shown above.

To display small icons, click on the Small Icon View button on the toolbar as shown above.

The Images and Size drop-down lists shown below provide a convenient way to sort the thumbnails.  

FastStone also has a basic set of photo editing tools. Since my photo editing is limited to simple operations such as cropping and dust removal, this is a full tool set. The crop board tool is shown below

The software I was looking for, FastStone is a fast and capable photo organizer. Being freeware, the price is absolutely right. If you don't need all the features of a high-ticket photo organizer, it might be worth a try.

Using FastStone will speed up the sorting of my archives. I'll be done with the heavy lifting early this year, and will be able to spend less time with the computer, and more with the camera. And I have a solution for the nasty habit that caused the problem in the first place. Using the card reader, I now pre-sort photos while they are still on the memory card. Most of the trash never gets uploaded.

Download FastStone 4.0 at http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm.