FastStone Image Viewer 2.9

FastStone Image Viewer is more than just an image viewer, it is a fully fledged image editing application with extensive features and best of all, it is free for personal use.

On first startup it searches you computer for all your images. You can view a folder of images at a time by selecting the folder from the treeview on the left. All images are in thumbnail format and you can re-sort them and change viewing options. When you click an image it appears in the Preview pane in the bottom left, double clicking the icon will launch the image in full screen. In full screen mode it gives you details like dimensions and file size.

There are hundreds of options under plenty of menus, this makes the program look complicated to start off with but you get used to it rather quickly. The application is attractive with a whole host of themes to choose from.

You can email and print pictures, set them as wallpapers, view a slideshow, add quick fixes, add a folder to your Favourites, resize, resample and crop images plus much more.

The application is fast, free, attractive and a pleasure to use. There are plenty of options to change the look of the application to how you like it and with so many features it is more than just an image viewer. You can download it now from: http://www.faststone.org/

Simon North, 30th January 2007

Corel Snapfire

From the company that brings us WordPerfect Office, Paint Shop and CorelDraw comes a free photo management application called Corel Snapfire. The idea of the application is to make organising, fixing and sharing your digital photos easy. The application is available as a free download from the Corel website (www.corel.com).

Snapfire looks great and is perfect for quickly fixing photos, but really you need a dedicated photo editing package for the best results.

The application also allows you to create album pages, calendars, greetings cards and collages, making it perfect if you want to create your own photo album or fancy seeing a different photo every month on a calendar.

You can use Quick Review to see your images in a slideshow which has great slide merging effects, but as with the rest of the program, you’ll need a good computer to run it. On a 1GHz computer with 256MB of RAM, the program took over a minute to load fully.

If you like the program then you could buy Corel Snapfire Plus for £29.99 which gives you a whole range of fantastic features including basic video editing.

Simon North, October 2006