FastStone: A Great Free Photo Resizer & Viewer

Considering Windows Vista, there are two major built-in image tools: Windows Photo Gallery and Microsoft Office Picture Manager. The former simply doesn’t pack enough functionality whereas the latter provides slightly more functions while compromising on speed. Therefore if one needs to work with images, a third party program becomes essential; built-in windows programs just aren’t up to the task.

Today we explore one of the commendable image editing programs available on the web – FastStone Image Viewer. Sized at only 4.5MB this program can be downloaded and installed instantly. If you’re a home user, you can use FastStone free of charge. (For commercial use, however, the product’s website states there is a fee. Although it is unclear how the distinction is made between Home and Commercial.)

The interface is designed to easily browse to your photos. When you click on an image folder to the left, pictures it contains are showed to the right with amazing speed. When you run FastStone, the folder you had previously opened is accessed. The images, again, are loaded up with amazing speed.

Functions included in this image editing program aren’t anything short of impressive. With the buttons located on the top you can resize images, open up a cropping board, rotate the image clockwise or counterclockwise, select multiple images and then compare them, begin a slideshow of the folder being viewed, print photos, and email images.

One uniquely cool function performed by of one these buttons is the ability to ‘cut’ a part of a screen. Bloggers such as me often need a portion of the screen to be copied to insert into our posts. For this reason we first need to press the ‘Print Screen’ button, then paste and crop the copied image. But with the screen capture tool, one can choose the appropriate option and use the mouse pointer to capture the image of the entire screen, a window, a rectangular region, or even a freehand cut out! This image is then displayed at the bottom left of FastStone where you can right-click and save it. What a great timesaver!
Another one of this tool’s noteworthy feature is the ability to resize, convert the format and name of images as batches. You can specify more than one image have them all converter or renamed according to your particulars. All you do is enter the Tools menu and open the Batch Convert dialog:

Apart from all these features, FastStone Image Viewer includes an array of exciting functions which we are continuously discovering. With its awesome speed and powerful functionality, this program can very well be the only image editing tool you need.

FastStone: Download