Fast Picture Viewer

FastPictureViewer is optimized for full-screen, borderless preview of digital images. It covers a limited number of scenarios, such as for example the initial pre-selection and rating of a relatively small number of images from a large set of potentially thousands ("culling"). The program has no image editing or image enhancement features and does not create and maintain a thumbnail database (it uses the system-provided thumbnail cache on Windows Vista or later), on the other hand it can browse deeply nested folder/subfolder trees containing many thousand images quickly and in a simple manner; the user interface is kept to the strict minimum and the program relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts. The software has been dubbed "the Porsche of image viewers" and described as "unbeatably fast" by German magazine c't Magazin für Computertechnik (the program also appeared in the magazine's software collection and in a subsequent article on Adobe DNG raw workflow software roundup).

According to the publisher the program features full color management, including support for custom-profiled wide-gamut monitors and ICCv2 and ICCv4 profile formats. Image rating is supported using industry-standard conventions (Adobe XMP), along with image pre-loading and caching if computer resources allows (the 64-bit edition of the program takes advantage of the memory than can be present beyond the 4GB boundary). The program can make use of multi-core CPUsfor parallel image loading. It uses DirectX hardware acceleration when available to accelerate zooming and panning, black & white preview and lost shadows / lost highlights views, and can also downsize very large images (e.g. astronomic pictures) to make them fit in video memory or computer RAM if necessary. The software also features an IPTC metadata editor letting users annotate pictures (add or edit headline, caption, keywords, author and copyright information) in a way that is compatible with established industry standards.

New images can be added to the browsed folder(s) and the program catches them on the fly, allowing continued browsing without the need to exit and reload the folder(s), while a tracking mode can automatically displays that last image added to the folder tree, useful when photographing in tethered mode or with a Wi-Fi enabled camera that transfers images to a computer using PTP or FTP, so images can be displayed as they are shot. An automatic advance mode (simple slide show) is also provided, along with a navigation slider that can be used to jump to different places in the current image list (under Windows Vista or later, the navigation slider displays a thumbnail image picturing the target location; a thumbnail strip is also displayed at the top of the program's window).