FastPictureViewer is a small and fast image viewer for Windows Vista and XP. It supports rating and copying images on the fly, as you view them either in windowed mode or full screen.

FastPictureViewer was designed for photographers, editors or anyone needing to quickly review, label and rate large amounts (thousands) of digital photos on a regular basis.

FastPictureViewer can help save your time. Its aim is to be your first choice for a quick first-pass culling/review of 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.

Yes. FastPictureViewer is a modern, native Windows (Win32) application built with full Unicode support from the ground up. Folders and file names can be made of non-Latin characters e.g. Far East, Arabic, Hebrew etc without restrictions as the program takes full advantage of the native Unicode support present in Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Example 1: You just come back from a trip or assignment with 150, 1'500 (or 15'000) pictures and you need to review them as quickly as possible to select the ones that will get further processed.

Example 2: You work as a photographer and take well over 1,000 pictures a week on average. You need a viewer that'll let you look through these photos as quickly as possible within the directory trees you created to categorize them manually.

Example 3: You are a web designer and somebody just handed you a well organized DVD chock-full of pictures in nested sub-folders and you need to quickly find out what's in there and pick a few ones among several thousand for the web project you are working on (in particular, you don't want to wait a few hours for your usual organizer to create thumbnails of everything before you start).

Example 4: You are a picture editor for a magazine, in the field at a large sporting event, and the still warm CF cards keeps flooding your desk. Your assistants dump the flashcards to your local hard-disk through a wireless network and your job is to find a cover picture and a few other good candidates for publication among a really huge and ever growing set of just shot images. You could not care less about thumbnails or image enhancement tools at this stage, you just want to see what you got, fast, and rate the keepers on-the-fly.

Its speed. FastPictureViewer is insanely fast, it loads in a split second and operates very quickly. In many cases you'll be done with your review and pre-selection work when competing solutions are still crawling your drive, helplessly creating thousands of thumbnails and index entries, eating up all of your machine's power doing so. Beside that, the user interface is so slick and uncluttered, you will learn it literally in seconds instead of days and be instantly more productive. FastPictureViewer does very little, but it does it very well and that's what sets it apart from the crowd.

Yes. FastPictureViewer can optionally create/update Adobe XMP sidecar files and optionally write embedded XMP and Windows Vista metadata within JPEG (JFIF), HD Photo / JPEG XR and TIFF containers. The program currently supports xmp:Rating, xmp:Label, photoshop:Urgency and MicrosoftPhoto:Rating, allowing you to quickly rate, label and categorize your image directly from FastPictureViewer at the press of a key. Intelligent image cataloguing software suites (e.g. Lightroom, IDimager and the like) and Vista Explorer can later use this information to help sort, select, rank or otherwise organize your images.

FastPictureViewer performs best when configured as follow:

Enable graphic processor (GPU) hardware acceleration - ON
Enable sRGB color-space conversion - OFF
Enable high quality image downscaling - OFF
Enable parallel image loading on multicore / multiprocessor computers - ON
Enable automatic image rotation - OFF

Remarks:

Graphic processor (GPU) hardware acceleration is not available and/or does not work on all graphic cards. High-end and newer cards tends to work best. Since FastPictureViewer uses video memory to cache images, the more VideoRAM, the better.

sRGB color-space conversion is normally not needed, unless you camera is set to shoot on a different color space, e.g. AdobeRGB. Turning this option ON negatively affects loading speed for some images. Leave this option OFF unless you absolutely know that you need to turn it on.

High quality image downscaling has no negative effect on performance if hardware acceleration can be turned ON, as the smoothing is performed by the GPU, but negatively affects display performance otherwise in exchange for smoother displayed images.

Parallel image loading is desirable on multicore and multiprocessor computers, provided that the disk subsystem is very fast.

Automatic image rotation will negatively impact the loading speed for all images, even those who don't need to be rotated, as FastPictureViewer has to load and decode more information to decide what to do. Moreover, rotated images are displayed about 50% reduced, thus forces you to always zoom them to assess their sharpness. Once you are used to it, it's actually much quicker to look at the pictures sideways!

You may want to try to turn some of the option ON and OFF one by one and experiment a little to find out what works best for your computer and your needs.

Yes. Just associate FastPictureViewer.exe with JPEG files from Windows Explorer, for example using the "Open With..." feature.

Yes. The current version feature two different levels of shell integration, first with a "Browse with FastPictureViewer..." right-click context-menu option for folders and drives, which let you quickly launch the program on a local folder or device from Windows Explorer, and next the program features seamless integration with Window's AutoPlay mechanism, which is used to launch FastPictureViewer automagically when you plug a digital camera or insert a media containing pictures (flashcard, data DVD...). You can just plug a camera or card, quickly browse its content, pick what you need, unplug it, plug another camera or card, browse, pick, etc... all very quickly. The program also let you "copy" the current image file to the clipboard (by pressing the familiar Ctrl+C key combination), and from there you can "paste" the image anywhere in Windows Explorer (FastPictureViewer copies JPEG+HD Photo "stacks" in one operation while the Professional also understand RAW+JPEG stacks).

FastPictureViewer also supports drag and drop from Windows Explorer. Just drop a photo (or a set of photos) on the viewer to open them, or drop a folder to open it in folder browsing mode.

Yes, FastPictureViewer Professional can open and preview RAW images from a number of top cameras, however, specific RAW formats compatibility is subjected to the availability of a suitable manufacturer-provided RAW image coder/decoder (codec). The decoding speed of existing codecs is incompatible with instant display so FastPictureViewer will initially limit itself to previewing only. Please check the image file formats compatibility chart for more information about current support. When both a JPEG and a RAW are available for a given image, FastPictureViewer always prefers to display the JPEG (for speed). This behavior cannot be configured at this time.

As of early 2008, free RAW image codecs for Windows Vista are available from Canon (30+ cameras including 1D and 1Ds MkIII), Nikon (20+ cameras, including the new D3 and D300), Olympus, Pentax (7+ cameras), Sony (5+ cameras) and Adobe (DNG), with probably more formats and cameras to come in the future. A commercial 3rd-party codec supporting the Adobe DNG format is also sold by Ardfry Imaging, LLC while LeadTOOLS provides several WIC codecs as part of their WPF imaging developer's toolkits. FastPictureViewer aim is to support as many image formats as possible in the future. Please check the file formats compatibility chart for information about current support.

Please note that most codecs are developed for Windows Vista and, depending on the manufacturer or 3rd-party supplier, codecs may or may not be available for (and/or installable on) Windows XP.

Full RAW decoding can be extremely slow depending on the format and the size of the images so FastPictureViewer will initially limit itself to extracting the preview image available in some RAW formats for instant display. A list of codec developers is maintained on the Microsoft Pro Photo website.

Unfortunately, no. FastPictureViewer uses techniques normally used by games to speed up image display, however the size of the images themselves far exceeds the typical games scenarios, where many relatively small textures are used to 'paint' 3D scenes. Some operations that we need to perform are not very well supported by certain cards and drivers, e.g. entry-level, older or 'lightweight' 3D hardware as found on some laptops are not well supported.

The program has been found to work extremely well, with hardware acceleration enabled, on high-end NVIDIA video cards with 256MB or more of video memory and latest drivers. We are working to extend support for more cards as soon as possible as we aim to cover the largest user base, if technically possible.

The program currently ships with hardware acceleration turned OFF by default and falls back to normal drawing techniques (but you still benefit from advanced preloading and caching if you have enough main memory). You can enable hardware acceleration manually from the program options. We are interested to hear from your experiences, feel free to write to us.

Yes. You can use the -i option to specify the image folder from the command line and the -c option to set the keep/copy folder, as follow:

Browse the default Picture folder automatically: FastPictureViewer -i
Browse an arbitrary local folder automatically: FastPictureViewer -i "the_folder_path"
Set the keep/copy folder: FastPictureViewer -c "any_folder"
Start in kiosk mode: FastPictureViewer -k
Start on monitor 2: FastPictureViewer -m 2
Start with track mode active (auto-display last added picture): FastPictureViewer -t

The options can be combined and could be set, for example, in a shell shortcut.

You can also launch FastPictureViewer.exe with an image name or a folder name on the command line and it will open. Be sure to enclose pathnames in double quotes as they can contain spaces: FastPictureViewer "C:\Users\Me\Pictures\Image123.jpg"

These features allows you to configure FastPictureViewer as an external viewer for some image cataloguing software suites.

FastPictureViewer Home Basic supports the JPEG format (*.jpeg, *.jpg, *.jpe, *.jfif, *.exif) and Microsoft HD Photo (*.hdp, *.wdp) / JPEG-XR, while FastPictureViewer Home Premium adds support for web and Windows formats such as PNG (with per-pixel alpha), GIF (with transparency), BMP, RLE, DIB, and ICO. FastPictureViewer Professional further adds support for TIFF (*.tiff, *.tif) along with support for previewing a number of RAW formats from digital cameras manufacturers and 3rd-party plug-in providers.

Yes. FastPictureViewer home editions already supports future formats like HD Photo / JPEG XR and the Professional version dynamically discovers which image formats it can read upon startup, so it will recognize and automatically use any new codec that you might add to your system in the future, for example a new camera RAW format or the upcoming HD Photo-based JPEG XR high dynamic range format once finalized, provided that the codec is written for the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) framework and exposes the necessary image decoding functions. Some adjustments might be necessary for full compatibility with a new image format, for example for metadata extraction, but FastPictureViewer evolutive internal architecture should be able to cope with most future requirements.

Yes. Software developers can write their own WIC-enabled codecs and FastPictureViewer Professional automatically recognize and use the new formats as they are added to the system. Moreover, your formats will get full platform support on Windows Vista (thumbnails in Windows Explorer, browsing/viewing/editing from Windows Photo Gallery etc) so it's really worth the effort. Codecs ships separately and must be downloaded and installed from their respective supplier's websites by the end-users. Programming information needed for developing WIC-enabled codecs is available on the MSDN website.

Yes, this is planned for an upcoming release. It will be possible to write plug-ins (in the form of COM classes, either in native or managed code) to extend FastPictureViewer, for example to provide custom actions on the current image. FastPictureViewer could then be used as the front-end image selector for a variety of systems or applications dealing with digital photos. Email us for more information!

Yes, with ease. For example browsing several thousands, even tens of thousands of images in a deeply nested folder tree is not a problem, FastPictureViewer was precisely designed to do just that from the word go! FastPictureViewer also picks up, on the fly, all pictures added to the folders and subfolders, as you browse them. Pictures are simply appended to FastPictureViewer's internal lists as they get added to your hard-disk (and it never misses one, even under the heaviest load), so you never need to "quit and re-start over" because new pictures just arrived.

Not in version 1.0. Pictures have to be on local devices, such as internal or external hard-disks, memory cards, removable media like CD or DVD, you can even browse pictures directly out of the camera (if it supports a mode where is appears as a removable drive to the operating system). Pictures can be copied to your computer from over a network, though, just set up a shared folder as usual and FastPictureViewer will pick up new images up on the fly as they are added. A wicked scenario would be to set up a wireless LAN (e.g. with the Nikon WT series wireless transmitters, such as the WT-4's) and have the camera(s) automatically send the pictures, as they are shot, to a "hot" folder on your disk drive, said folder being watched by FastPictureViewer: you could then perform the initial selection in near-real time. The reason for the restriction to local devices is that the real-time folder/subfolder watching does not work across networks.

Yes. FastPictureViewer can copy the images you select to any location where you have the proper write access, including local or remote drives, writable removable devices or media etc, without restriction. FastPictureViewer uses fast background copy techniques to write the images you select with a single keystroke or mouse click, without interrupting your viewing. FastPictureViewer even understand "stacks" of images such as JPEG+HD Photo (all editions) or JPEG+RAW (Professional Edition) and copies the files in pairs, as you'd expect.

Yes. FastPictureViewer is fully multi-monitor aware and can be displayed on any monitor in a multi-monitor setup, e.g. you could have it on your primary display while you use Windows Explorer or any other application on your second display, or the other way around. It will also properly maximize itself on the monitor where it's on when you toggle on the kiosk mode, for example. The program will also remember its monitor, position and state (normal, maximized, kiosk mode) for the next launch. FastPictureViewer can even be displayed across monitors with full acceleration on, although only on supported hardware, such as higher-end NVIDIA dual-head graphic accelerators.

No, however FastPictureViewer optionally supports automatic rotation from EXIF orientation metadata, if present in the pictures.

Yes. FastPictureViewer, unlike 99% of all software sold today, comes as a digitally signed executable within a digitally signed installation database. Digital code signing (we use a Thawte Authenticode certificate) ensure that the files you install are genuine originals and were not tampered with in any way, as Windows validates the digital signatures at installation time. Digital signature also ensure full traceability of the files, with authoring information and time stamps securely embedded in them.

Furthermore, for normal viewing your image files are opened strictly in read-only mode thus not modifiable by FastPictureViewer itself even in the advent of a error causing a program crash. However, the XMP rating/labeling and Windows Vista rating functions can optionally add or update information contained within the image files themselves, thus modify the files by definition.

Finally, FastPictureViewer is delivered using the latest Microsoft Windows Installer technology and thus is fully un-installable, shall you decide to stop using it.

No. To be certain of that, we perform regular virus/malware checks on our own development machines and on the files that we produce and ship. We tested our files, and they came out perfectly clean, with several different virus/malware scanners, including the latest versions of AVG, AVast, BitDefender, ClamAV, DrWeb, F-Prot, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, Panda, Sophos, Symantec and VirusBuster. Moreover our build machine runs Windows Defender and Kaspersky 7.0, both up-to-date, all the time so we are pretty confident that we ship pristine-clean digitally signed files.

However, we use a protection mechanism to preserve our intellectual property and enforce license restrictions. Part of this protection includes compression, obfuscation and encryption of the executable file itself in order to make reverse-engineering and decompiling a little more challenging. Some of these measures COULD potentially triggers a "suspicious" warning from SOME heuristic-based malware scanners (but none from the above list). We are prepared to live with that slight inconvenience in exchange for some reasonable resistance to piracy.

We know it's a bit difficult for a new company (and new product) to establish itself as reputable and safe, but everyone has to start someday. Please do not hesitate to email us of you have any questions or concerns regarding security. Also note that we successfully submitted our application to a number of download sites, including Softpedia.com and Download.com (C|NET), and we came out 100%clean from their repeated malware scrutiny checks too.

All binaries (msi/exe/dll) composing FastPictureViewer are digitally signed with a code signing certificate ("Authenticode"), similar in concept to the SSL certificates used in e-commerce to validate the legitimacy of web servers. To ensure the validity of certificates, Windows sometimes checks a service known as the Certificate Revocation List (or crl), some sort of blacklist where stolen or compromised certificates would be reported. This check is done as a security measure by the operating system, at application launch time, before the program's execution even begins. The WIC image codecs used by FastPictureViewer are also required to be digitally signed by their respective publishers (Microsoft, Nikon, Canon, ...) as the imaging framework refuses to load non signed plug-ins, whose origin cannot be determined.

Digital signatures ensure traceability and integrity of executable code, their purpose is twofold:

1) Ensure the software came from the software publisher (traceability)
2) Protect the software from alteration after publication (integrity)

Code signing with runtime signature verification and code integrity checks together represent a huge step towards safer computing. The signed executables can still do pretty much anything they want (within the security constraints imposed by the system), but at least one knows exactly who published the code, when, and that said code was not altered in any way since it was published, still a lot better than loading and running arbitrary executables that might not always be what they appear to be.

You can find out about the presence of digital certificates (and learn who signed a particular file and when) by right-clicking the exe/dll/msi in Windows Explorer and clicking the "Digital Signatures" tab, which appears only for signed modules.

No. FastPictureViewer performs only the activities necessary to support its advertized functions. In particular it does not open files other than the image you submit to it and does not use the registry beyond what's normally needed to store the program configuration, user preferences and trial/license information.

The The program optionally checks for new versions on this website upon startup, by reading the same RSS feed that you can subscribe to from the download page. No personal information is transmitted during those version checks (technically speaking, the program performs a plain-vanilla parameter-less HTTP "GET", just like any web browser would do, without transmitting any personally identifiable elements).

The version check is enabled by default as we believe this mechanism provides a good way to keep users informed of new versions, enhanced functionality and/or bug fixes. When a new version is available, the program simply notifies in a non-intrusive "balloon" window at the bottom of the screen, you but will not dow download or install anything. It's up to you to visit the website at your best convenience and download the latest version whenever you are ready to do so. The automatic version checks can easily be turned off from the program options, if desired, and the first version update check typically occurs only about a week after installation.

When the program gets licensed, a license server is briefly contacted during the registration process to verify the validity of the license code, after which the software will be permanently activated on your computer. During this check, the licensing information that was sent to you in your purchase confirmation email, and entered by you in the program's registration window, is transmitted to the registration server by necessity. The server can deny the activation request, for example if it detects that a particular license key has be used an abnormal number of times.

No. FastPictureViewer runs just fine within the context of a standard user. Under Windows Vista it runs perfectly with User Account Control (UAC) enabled, without triggering privilege elevation prompts except on two specific occasions: first during setup as the program install itself and also when recording the registration key if such a key is installed (the program is then registered for all users on the given computer). For everyday operations FastPictureViewer does not require elevated privileges to run.

No but, as a general rule in imaging applications, the faster the better. In particular, FastPictureViewer will put your shiny multi-core CPU to good use if you have one. It can also take advantage of available main memory to buffer images and increase its speed so the more RAM the better. Finally, FastPictureViewer can use the power of your DirectX™ graphic accelerator card and its vast video memory to further speed up your viewing experience. In short, you need a lot of memory (512MB as a strict minimum) but a fast computer is not an absolute requirement.

On the other hand you can be confident that modern and fast hardware will be well exploited to help speed up your viewing. Keep in mind that image processing is a very demanding computer application in general; there is no substitute for a fast machine with ample memory and fast disks if you need to work with many large digital images on a regular basis.

With some small restrictions, yes. You must download the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) from the Microsoft website, in the language that suits your Windows installation, and install it yourself. WIC requires that you run Windows XP with Service Pack 2. We cannot distribute this component and install it for you because you must validate your copy of Windows with Microsoft before they let you download WIC, and we don't have redistribution rights. FastPictureViewer does not run on any version of Windows prior to XP SP2, in particular it does not run on Windows 2000.

WIC is a light and free-as-in-beer 1.3MB download that installs quickly and normally does not require a reboot, so this should not be a problem (and you have to do this only once). Windows Server 2003 is supported with the same restrictions as XP. Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 already includes WIC so there is nothing to install besides FastPictureViewer itself.

FastPictureViewer Professional Edition users: please also check the manufacturer-supplied RAW codec system requirements.

On OSX, no, sorry. FastPictureViewer uses a host of Windows-specific features and knowledge and unfortunately we don't (at least yet) have the corresponding expertise on the Macintosh, we just cannot do a FastPictureViewer for that platform at this time.

On the other hand, FastPictureViewer runs just fine on Vista including on a Mac. We have a customer running it with great success on a 16GB, 8 cores Mac Pro equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphic adapter so, in a sense, FastPictureViewer does run on the Mac ;-)

FastPictureViewer requires Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) or Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) with Windows Imaging Component (WIC). Earlier Windows version (in particular Windows 2000) are not supported.

Windows Vista is fully supported and the preferred operating system to run FastPictureViewer. Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is recommended as it features many stability and performance improvements, some of which directly benefits FastPictureViewer.

Currently, slightly more than 1 MB (yes, no typo, one megabyte and change). FastPictureViewer downloads and installs in seconds and has no dependencies or pre-requisite (except for XP, where you must install WIC, see above). RAW format previewing and 3rd-party plug-ins supported by FastPictureViewer Professional requires separate downloads and installations.

FastPictureViewer Home Basic (which supports XMP and Vista rating, JPEG and Microsoft HD Photo / JPEG-XR) is available free of charge for personal use for renewable 120-days periods (freeware license). Instead of doing the usual annoying 14-days trial nag screen trick, we try something new: the software simply expires 120 days after installation and ceases to work (it refuses to start), but you can always come back to this website and download the latest version to get another 120 days of free use and so on ;-) We hope you'll like FastPictureViewer enough to purchase a license without needing to be harassed every time you start and exit the program. The free version can be used indefinitely for as long as you keep it up-to-date by installing the current version every 3 months. We implemented this 120 days policy to avoid dealing with too many different versions out there. This greatly simplifies customer support and make sure bug fixes reaches every users in a reasonable amount of time.

Enthusiasts and supportive users can purchase an inexpensive home user license and register their copy, which will cease expiring and morph into a permanent FastPictureViewer Home Premium with PNG, GIF, BMP, RLE, DIB and ICO formats support in addition to JPEG and HD Photo / JPEG XR. FastPictureViewer Home Premium Edition can be installed on up to five (5) computers within the licensee household, for family members. Licensed users are of course encouraged to keep their copy up to date, but the 120 days limit of the freeware version is lifted and there is absolutely no obligation to update whatsoever.

Professional users (i.e. those who earn any kind of money from photography, either directly or indirectly) are required to license FastPictureViewer Professional, which extends upon the home editions and features TIFF support, in addition to select camera RAW and 3rd-party formats previewing, if the appropriate image decoders are installed on your computer (see the FAQ entries above for more information about RAW support and the image file formats compatibility chart page). The software is licensed on a per user and per computer basis, but users possessing two computers (say, a desktop machine and a laptop) can install the software on both of his/her machines as part of the Professional license.

All licenses includes minor updates, for example if you purchase a FastPictureViewer Professional 1.0 license, you are entitled to download all subsequent 1.x version releases and benefit from bug fixes and functionality enhancements for as long as the 1.x branch is actively developed.

Our goal is to make FastPictureViewer a very affordable product for its target users. Check out the purchase page for details.

Volume and site licensing can also be arranged upon request.

No. We hate SPAM just as you do, so we don't do that and don't do mass-mailings either.

In principle, no, but if you've got an idea,  are warmly welcomed, we'd love to hear from you! FastPictureViewer can be referenced on any download site, though. The PAD file is here.