Are you looking for a full-featured, freeware image browser with image editor capabilities for Windows XP? Do you need to easily browse all images on your local and removable media? Have you been searching for the best way to transfer (a.k.a. download) images to your computer from your Camera, or other removable USB media– and at the same time, be able to immediately edit those images and save them into your preferred folder, or email?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you should have a look at the relatively new media browser and editor, FastStone, by FastStone Soft.
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What makes it Practical?
FastStone stands out among the other freeware image viewers; image browsers which boast of some built-in editing capabilities in that it is the perfect software to use for editing a set of images in one folder. For example, I had a folder full of Versions of a logo i had been designing. Each image contained a useful area, but also extra material which would need some cropping before it could be used in any production situation. Much to my delight, after I finished cropping the first image of the folder (having planned to crop only that image), I noticed the buttons in the "crop-window" for advancing to the next, or previous image in the directory. Clicking Next, FastStone advanced to the next image while retaining the crop area from the previous image selection. Since each image actually needed to be cropped in the same exact area as that of the first, I was able to blow through that directory, cropping each image precisely as I desired, in a fraction of the time it would have taken to re-select the appropriate section of each consecutive image in the folder. I'm quite sure I'll take advantage of this feature many more times in the future!
Granted, not every image editing task is going to present itself as a set of nearly identical images, each containing a similar area to be cropped-- but the feature is nonetheless a remarkable advantage. The thinking behind this kind of development seems quite intuitive in comparison to some of its software category brethren. Check it out if you're at all frustrated with your current options. You may be pleasantly surprised.
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