FastPictureViewer Professional

This is a minor release with small sizeing adjustements in the Options dialog, rebuilt with the latest toolset.

This release addresses an issue occurring on Windows 10 where the program can crash when right-clicking into a text input window where you can enter substitution variables. Those input windows can be found in the Renaming Template editor (F2) as well as in the File Utilities plug-in (Ctrl+F). The program customizes the default context menu for edit fields and add custom options letting users easily paste variables into the text, and a change in recent versions of Windows 10 caused the menu customization in FPV Pro to crash. The issue has been corrected.

This release addresses an issue introduced in the previous build, where the 64-bit version of the product was inadvertently built as requiring an Intel AVX2-enabled processor, preventing the program to load on older machines. This issue has been corrected.

This release addresses an issue occurring on Windows 10 where the program can crash when right-clicking into a text input window where you can enter substitution variables. Those input windows can be found in the Renaming Template editor (F2) as well as in the File Utilities plug-in (Ctrl+F). The program customizes the default context menu for edit fields and add custom options letting users easily paste variables into the text, and a change in recent versions of Windows 10 caused the menu customization in FPV Pro to crash. The issue has been corrected.

The plugin that uploads to Zenfolio.com has been updated, following deprecation of the Zenfolio API 1.6: you can publish to Zenfolio again!

New to web upload from FastPictureViewer Professional? It's easy as pie! Just mark the images you want to publish by pressing the P key (pressing P again removes the mark).

When you are ready, Press Ctrl+P to fire up the publishing system. First time requires a little setup, but you can publish, quickly, to Facebook, Flicker, 500px, Smugmug, Zenfolio and PhotoShelter, as well as to any local destination of your chosing (a local folder, an USB key, a picture frame etc...) - all with the legendary speed you can expect from FPV Pro! There is a complete web publishing tutorial on our help page, try publishing today!

Additional improvements were made to substitution variables and functions: {LTrim{Variable}} and {RTrim{Variable}} remove any leading and trailing (right-side) blanks from {Variable}, respectively, while {LTrim{Variable},n} and {RTrim{Variable},n} remove any blanks AND also shaves n characters. Say you have a folder naming scheme where you use some fixed-length prefix, as in "01. Holidays". Assume it's the parent folder for the sake of example, then {LTrim{FilePath[1]},4} will resolve to "Holidays". Additionally, {Trim{Variable}} removes both leading and trailing blanks.

The renaming templates substitution variables have been enhanced to simplify some scenarios as well as support more advanced ones.

To make it simpler to use the parent folder name in a new generated file name, the {FilePath} macro, which normally returns the entire path, now accepts an argument that let you pick the path segment you are interested in.

Say your ducks images are in C:\Images\Birds\Ducks and your files are named after the specie, like Widgeon.jpg

Say you want to rename the files after the parent and grandparent folder, to get birds_ducks_widgeon.jpg

What is needed are lowercase versions of the orginal file name as well as of the parent and grandparent folder, as follow:

{FilePath[2]:2}_{FilePath[1]:2}_{FileName:2}

Let's look a little closely: {FilePath[2]} returns the name of the grandparent folder, while the suffix :2 in {FilePath[2]:2} causes that name to be lowercased. If you want to create BirdsDucksWidgeon.jpg instead, use the title case suffix, :3, and remove the underscores: {FilePath[2]:3}{FilePath[1]:3}{FileName:3}

You can even remove the tailing 's' with {Replace{FilePath[2]:3},"s$",""}{Replace{FilePath[1]:3},"s$",""}{FileName:3} to yield BirdDuckWidgeon.jpg

New: you can use two new file hashes, CRC-32 and CRC-64, in addition to the existing MD-5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 hashes in {FileHash:3} and {FileHash:4}, respectively. The CRC-32 hash produces the same value as WinZIP. You can add the file's hash to the file name to make the name unique, or to enable future integrity checks. Say you rename all your files with {FileName}#{FileHash:3} to append a CRC-32 hash. You can later use some utility and a script to verify that the hash of the file's content matches the hash in the file name. Use a known separator to split the name and hash portion, '#' being a perfect choice, and make it a suffix, as in this example. This allows to extract the hash part easily, and even to create a macro to remove them, for example {Replace{FileName},"#[0-9a-h]{8}",""} will undo {FileName}#{FileHash:3}

CRC-32 will detect most corruptions but if you want to make it virtually impossible to alter the files without also changing the file names, use a cryptographic hash such as MD-5, SHA-1 or SHA-256 (at the expense of a much longer name).

New (advanced): You can apply a regular expression to any variable: {RegEx{FileName}:<regex_with_capture_group>}{1}

New (advanced): You can replace substrings, e.g. {Replace{FileName}, "[aeiouy]", ""} will remove all vowels (replace them with the empty string)

New (advanced): You can use functions to further customize the names you create, such as {Upper{Variable}}, {Left{Variable},n} and more (see the context menu in the template editor)

As a reminder, the tenaming templates are greated/edited from within FastPictureViewer Pro using the rename function (F2). Once created, the templates can be used to rename in batch using the File Utilities batch processor (Ctrl+F) as well as within the Auto Grouping plug-in and in the Local Storage export plugin.

Improved overall detection of color profiles in tagged and untagged files, in particular for some Nikon NEF files, some Sony ARW files and some Pentax PEF files as well as a number of Exif-compliant other raw and JPEG files. As a result, FastPictureViewer Pro now detects images taken for example in Adobe RGB mode for more cameras than it did before.

Also, some small efficency improvements were made around color-management and some settings were optimized.

The color profile detection on some NEF files shot in AdobeRGB failed. References to Nokia Maps renamed to HERE Maps and fixed URL.

This release has no functional changes, just some housekeeping and workarounds for a change in Microsoft code-signing policy, which forced us to remove the digital signature on our installers, for now.

This release fixes a small regression that was reported recently: the 'B' (Black & White Preview) and 'C' (Check Highlights) keys were not working in GPU-accelerated mode in the last couple of builds.

We also made the folder content enumeration faster, the program should now take less time to find the pictures in your folders and subfolders. In our best test on our fast Samsung SSD 850 PRO the program finds the 25,840 pictures in our Pictures folder in about 4 seconds now, at a rate of about 6,460 images/sec. Let us know if the folder scan now seems faster for you, too.

If you did not know it yet, FastPictureViewer Pro has an awesome Black and White preview mode that let you quickly see how an image would look in shades of grey: just press the B key to toggle this mode, and hit B again to turn it off. The flag is per-image and is remembered across sessions for licensed users (this can be turned off on the options). When running in GPU-accelerated mode, the conversion to greyscale is done on-the-fly on the graphic card, as such the B&W preview is instantaneous regardless of the size of the image.

Sometimes a color image that looks just OK - that you might not even keep - looks stunning in greyscale, and the B can help you make the right call. You'd then do the greyscale conversion in post-processing using your favorite photo editor: tutorials for GIMP and Photoshop.

Likewise, the program features a shadow/highlight preview that display blown-out/blocked pixels instantly in GPU-accelerated mode. By default, the command is "spring-loaded" and won't stick, just briefly press the C key to check for blown highlight or blocked shadows (those within a couple of pixel values from the maximum/minimum pixel values).

The program options let you chose how the C key operates, either in a (unique!) combined highlight/shadow spring-loaded view, which is the default, as a sticky key for all images, or just highlights, then just shadows in a cycle. This mode let you asses the amount of "lost" pixels in your images, and the location of those pixels.

When working with RAWs you will quickly develop a feel telling you if the image can be salvaged or not in post-processing. Try it out!

This release features tiny enhancements, such as the addition of Select All / Select None buttons in the user interface of the File Utilities batch processor plug-in.

By the way, if you are not already using the File Utilities, do yourself a favor today and learn to use it. It is very powerful and quick. Study the screenshot below to see a glimpse of what it can do for you! Press Ctrl+F in FastPictureViewer Pro to get started and check out the great tutorial on our help page.

A screenshot of the File Utilities plug-in (Ctrl+F) in FPV Pro 1.9.351.0, displaying 3 user-defined rules.

This release adds first-class support for Cinemagraphs to FastPictureViewer Professional.

Below is a nice example of a Cinemagraph - a still picture with a twist - that can be played seamlessly inside FPV Pro (those files happens to be Animated GIFs, so we can say that FastPictureViewer now plays GIFs, too!) - You can right-click to zoom-in, pan, scroll to the next image, and run slideshows just like with any other image format: the animations play automagically and seamlessly, without any delay or any Play button!

You can find many examples and tutorials on the web to create your own Cinemagraphs, and of course you may already have a classic Animated GIF collection which just got a new life in FastPictureViewer Pro!

This release also fixes a long-standing issue with PNG transparency, when displayed on a non-black background and in GPU-accelerated mode.

A nice cinemagraph example by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg of Cinemagraphs.com