



Sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? Microsoft Office doesn’t attempt to completely take over the organisation of your Excel spreadsheets or your Word documents. I want to see a clear “1:1 relationship” between an image that I can see on the screen and the file in which it is held on the computer. I don’t like this – and neither do lots of other people. You do things their way and you trust that the program is keeping track of where everything is. This applies to Google Picasa and it applies to Mac’s iPhoto. “Photography software” tends to completely take over the storing of your images and you have to do things their way. I’ve been searching on and off for a month or so to see if I can find a Mac equivalent as I’m moving all my own photography onto my Macbook Pro (as there’s no doubt at all that my pictures look much better on a Mac than on any PC that I have ever owned).

So surprised, in fact, that I searched my website two or three times (using the search function at the righthand side of every page at to make sure I’m not having a senior moment. I’m very surprised to find that I haven’t previously blogged about Faststone Image Viewer. The program also knows how to work with RAW files of different manufacturers of digital cameras: CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF, ARW, SR2, RW2 and DNG.Faststone Image Viewer is an excellent, free, image viewer and editor for Windows All common graphic formats are supported: BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, PSD, EPS, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA. Other features of the program include high-quality image enlargement and creation of a slideshow with music with more than 150 effects of transition between slides, lossless editing of the JPEG format, adding user comments, support for scanners, histogram output and much, much more. Its innovative yet intuitive full-screen mode gives you quick access to EXIF metadata, thumbnail browsers and other important functions via automatically hiding toolbars that appear when the mouse cursor approaches the boundaries of the screen. The program's feature set is impressive: it's image viewing, photo management, file comparison, red-eye removal, image resizing and cropping, retouching and color correction, as well as sending graphics by email. FastStone Image Viewer is a fast and stable viewer, editor and image converter with a user-friendly interface.
