An alternative to FastStone and IrfanView

What the free ones get right

Let us start with what holds. IrfanView starts in a blink, weighs almost nothing, and through its plugins it can do more than most people will ever need. FastStone reads raw natively and broadly - CR3, NEF, ARW, RW2, DNG - and is actively maintained; version 8.4 added JPEG XL and PDF on top. Comparing up to four images side by side is a proper tool.

One thing people often repeat is not quite right either: both can page through subfolders. IrfanView has the Load thumbs from all subfolders option in its thumbnail window, FastStone a search-based flat listing. Anyone claiming it cannot be done has not tried it. Both are made for manageable folder trees - with a grown archive you notice that it was not the purpose.

For everyday use - one folder, a few hundred pictures, a quick look through - nobody needs anything else. This article is about what comes after that.

The first limit: raw and speed

Here the two part ways. FastStone handles raw well. IrfanView needs the plugin pack for it, and it develops the file in full instead of taking the embedded JPEG preview that every camera supplies. That is stated in its own FAQ. The difference is not a subtlety: developing a 45-megapixel raw in full is several times the work per image compared with reading out the finished preview that is sitting in the file anyway.

Nothing is lost that way: for deciding whether an image is sharp and the eyes are open, the embedded preview is entirely sufficient. Development comes later, on the twenty pictures that are left.

The second limit: your ratings belong to the program

This is the part that hurts, and it often only shows up years later.

FastStone lets you assign stars. Those stars land in its own database, though - an SQLite file under %LOCALAPPDATA%\FastStone\FSIV\FSIV.db - and not in the file, not in an XMP file beside it. It does not tell you. You can check it in half a minute: assign a rating, close FastStone, right-click the image in Explorer, Properties, Details. Nothing there. You spend an evening sorting through a thousand pictures, and what you decided exists only for as long as this program runs on this machine with this database.

On top of that comes a trap that does active damage: if you move files with the built-in function, XMP sidecar files do not travel with them. Anyone who rated in another program and then tidies up in FastStone loses the culling work silently - the stars are sitting in a file left behind in the old folder.

IrfanView does not solve the problem either; it has no rating in the sense of a photo workflow. XnView MP is the exception and gets it right: stars, color labels and keywords land there as XMP, readable in Lightroom and Bridge. If you want to stay with the free ones and still have clean metadata, that is a good place to be - just take the current rewrite, MP, and not the old XnView Classic.

Out of the box it shows you the file system rather than your photos, though: XMP files appear as their own tiles in the grid, raw and JPEG of the same shot as two separate entries, and under every picture a block of dimensions, file size, two dates and capture data. That can be changed - you compose the caption under the thumbnails yourself, and a custom exclude filter takes the XMP files out of the grid. You just have to know that you need to, and where. If you like a lot of information on the picture, you are well served; if you want to see photos rather than files while browsing, you set it up first.

For hobby use that may be enough. As soon as your selection is meant to arrive somewhere - in Lightroom, in Bridge, at a client, or simply with you again in five years - a rating that does not leave the program is not a rating.

The third limit: scale

A folder with three hundred photos behaves differently from an archive with a hundred thousand. Programs built for the first case do not get slower in the second - they get sticky: reading in takes time, thumbnails appear one after another, paging stutters.

It is not only the count that changed, but the size. When these programs earned their reputation, a JPEG was a few hundred kilobytes. Today a mid-range camera delivers forty megapixels, and the same job has become a different one.

That is not a reproach. It is a different task, and anyone who did not have it was right not to solve it.

What FlashView does at these three points

• Raw through the embedded preview - as fast as JPEG, because nothing is developed in full while you are only browsing.
• Ratings as standard XMP - straight beside the file, immediately, without you triggering anything. Readable in Lightroom, Bridge and Capture One.
• Built for size - the whole tree, no catalog, no waiting first.

What that means in numbers: we sent all four into the same folder - JPEGs from the same camera, the same machine - and counted how many images per second run past while paging.

That all three land on the same two to three is no coincidence and no accusation against any one program: it is the order of magnitude that tools built for folders work in. Thirty images per second is as fast as you can hold the arrow key down. You can reproduce this yourself at any time: the same folder, the same machine.

On top of that come things this class otherwise lacks: stars, color labels and pick/reject with one keystroke, filtering across the whole holding by EXIF and rating, card ingest with your own templates for folders and file names - and non-destructive editing for the quick fix, without switching programs.

And then comes the small fix

Something almost always turns up while you browse. The horizon is crooked. There is a license plate in the shot that has to go, or a face that should be unrecognizable. A tighter crop would be better. The same look should sit across the whole series.

These three can edit, certainly - crop, rotate, resize, red-eye. They just write the result into the file. Change your mind a year later and the original is gone. And for what actually comes up while culling - redacting, pixelating, straightening, carrying a look across - they are not built.

FlashView makes these changes non-destructively: the original stays put, every change can be taken back. On top of that, an ingest from the memory card that assembles target folder and file names from your own templates - the three do not have that. Batch conversion for the web is something they handle well, on the other hand.

Where the free ones stay ahead

• The price. There is no arguing that away. More on it in a moment.
• Format range. XnView covers over 700 formats, IrfanView through plugins almost everything that has ever existed. If you regularly open exotic files, stay with them.
• XnView MP on metadata. It writes clean XMP and even handles hierarchical keywords - the latter is something FlashView cannot do today. If you open up your archive through a keyword vocabulary, you are better served there.
• Batch conversion and tools. IrfanView's batch functions and FastStone's slideshow with 150 transitions have grown well.
• IrfanView as the system viewer for everything. Tiny footprint, opens genuinely any file. As a fast double-click viewer alongside everything else it keeps its place.

What 39 euros are

FlashView costs a one-time 39 euros. No subscription, no follow-up costs, no registration.

That is one dinner out with a glass of red wine. Measured against an evening spent working through two thousand pictures - and against culling work that does not vanish into someone else's database - it is not a purchase you think about for long.

Who the switch is worth it for

Stay with the free one if you work through manageable folders, do not process raw, do not cull systematically - or if you need exotic formats that only IrfanView will open anyway.

The switch is worth it if your archive has grown beyond single folders, you shoot raw, and your ratings are meant to arrive somewhere eventually rather than staying in a database nobody else can read.

If you are unsure: the two paths do not exclude each other. IrfanView as a tiny system viewer for any file at all, FlashView for the archive and the selection - that is a sensible division.

Try it yourself

FlashView runs for 60 days, complete and free, with no registration. The most honest test is your own archive. Go to the download - after that a license is a one-time 39 euros.