1 Your first folder

FlashView is a fast image viewer for Windows. Point it at a folder and the pictures are there - and you can page through them without waiting, even with tens of thousands of files.

The speed comes from what FlashView leaves out. There is no library, no catalog and no import step: you point at a folder and you see it.

That's also why it makes sense to point it at the top of your archive. Open Photos, switch on Recursive, and twenty years sit in front of you as a single surface, grouped by year and scrollable in one go. Hardly any other program offers that, because they all want to build a catalog first. And because browsing costs you nothing, hunting for one picture turns into wandering: you start at a year and two minutes later you're in a shoot you hadn't thought about for ages.

Everything else builds on that. You look at your pictures, give them stars and color labels, sort out the failures - and what you decide is written as standard XMP right next to the images, ready to be read by Lightroom, Bridge or Capture One.

• Open in the toolbar, or Ctrl+O.
• The small arrow next to it lists the folders you opened recently.
• From Explorer: right-click an image, Open with, FlashView. The picture comes up full size straight away.

The folder is there immediately, however many pictures are in it. The thumbnails are usually ready too by the time you scroll to them, because FlashView loads ahead in both directions. Only if you race down through a folder it has never seen before will you watch them catch up.

FlashView has two views, and one key each to reach them.

There's also fullscreen on F: it takes away the window frame and the taskbar so FlashView gets the whole screen. That isn't a third view - the toolbars and tools stay, you simply have more room. There's more on it in Showing your work.

Switching costs nothing. If you can't tell about a picture, look at it in the loupe and go straight back - that's quicker than squinting at a thumbnail.

Esc steps back one level each time: out of fullscreen into the window, out of the loupe into the grid. In the grid, Esc first clears any selection.

In the loupe the mouse pointer disappears after two seconds of stillness. It comes back as soon as you move the mouse.

The scroll wheel does the obvious thing in each place: it scrolls the grid and changes the picture in the loupe.

In the loupe the next image is simply there. You can work through a whole series without the program slowing you down - which is the entire point when there's a lot to get through.

Two keys drive it:

• Shift+T shows and hides the tree.
• T puts the keyboard focus into it, so you can walk through your folders with the arrow keys.

One detail that surprises people at first: FlashView remembers separately whether the tree should be visible in the grid and in the loupe. In the grid it's on by default, in the loupe it's off - there the space belongs to the picture. Both settings stick until you change them.

Everything is saved when you switch folders and when you quit.

2 Folders, subfolders and groups

Photographs rarely live in one folder. Usually there's a structure by year and date, and depending on what you're after you want to see a single shoot or the whole lot at once. Two switches in the toolbar handle that, and they get confused for each other all the time.

The selected folder is always whichever one is highlighted in the tree. That can be your top-level folder or something deep inside it - click a shoot in the tree and everything that follows applies to that shoot.

Recursive off. You see exactly what sits directly in the selected folder. The subfolders are listed in the tree, but their pictures stay out.

Recursive on. Same folder, now with everything underneath it. Four images become twenty-four.

Toggle it with the Recursive checkbox or with Shift+R. The setting applies per folder and sticks until you change it.

Say you've selected Photos, and 2026/Zoo sits underneath.

Depth 2 keeps each shoot together. That's how you work through them one at a time.

Depth 1 throws every shoot of a year into one pot. The pictures mix, ordered by whatever sort criterion is set.

• Recursive decides which pictures you see.
• Group depth decides how they're arranged.

Without recursive there's only one folder, so there's nothing to group and the group depth has nothing to do. The other way round works fine: go recursive and set the depth to 0, and you see everything in a single run.

3 Zoom and checking focus

Whether a picture is genuinely sharp isn't something you decide from a thumbnail. You have to get into the image, and at the spot that matters - usually the eyes.

Click to check. One click on the eyes shows them at full resolution - this is where you find out whether the focus really sits. The next click takes you back to the whole picture.

A double-click returns you to the grid. So does Esc, as long as you haven't zoomed in.

For finer control there's Ctrl+scroll, which steps through fixed levels from 6.25 % to 800 %. Without Ctrl the wheel changes the picture as usual.

When the full resolution joins in depends on the format:

• JPEG: only once you zoom to a hundred percent or beyond. Before that it would be wasted work.
• RAW: right away, without you doing anything. Zoom in and the real pixels are usually already there.

The framing stays put when it switches over; nothing jumps.

Lock zoom in the loupe's context menu keeps the zoom level and the framing as you page. Right-click the picture to open the menu.

With the zoom locked you stay on the same detail while you click through the series - one frame after another at the same spot, which is the fastest way through a burst.

If you'd rather see two frames side by side, that's what Compare on C is for. The two complement each other: locked zoom for a quick pass through many pictures, compare for the decision between the two that are left.

The setting sticks until you switch it off again. It's off by default, because when you're just looking through pictures you want to see the whole frame.

4 Metadata and histogram

While you're culling, the picture is all you need. When you start judging it, what the camera recorded helps - and so does the way the brightness and colors are distributed.

You get camera and lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed and ISO, plus capture date, image size, file size, and the artist and copyright fields where the camera fills them in.

Left alone, the panel settles between the histogram and the editing panel. If it covers the part of the picture you want to look at, drag it aside with the mouse and it stays there. After that it stops arranging itself alongside the others.

The colored area is the three color channels laid over each other: where all three overlap it turns white. The white line above them is the luminance distribution.

Black is on the left, white on the right. If the mass sits against the left edge the picture is dark or underexposed; against the right edge, the highlights are blown.

The histogram is calculated alongside everything else and doesn't slow your paging down. It sits underneath the EXIF panel and lets clicks through, so you can zoom or open the context menu straight through it without switching it off first.

FlashView remembers both panels: whatever you had switched on is back next time you start.

5 Showing your work

Looking at pictures is one thing; showing them to someone is another. Three features exist for exactly that - at a client meeting, when a series is being signed off, or simply when somebody is sitting next to you.

Esc or another F switches back. It works from any view.

Each picture stays up for four seconds by default; you can change that in the settings.

At the end the slideshow starts again from the beginning and keeps running until you stop it.

What gets shown is up to you, and there are two ways to decide:

• Through the filter. Set a filter, say four stars and up, and start with S. The slideshow runs over whatever the filter leaves.
• Through a selection. Mark individual pictures in the grid and it runs over those only, regardless of what else is in the folder.

The first is quicker for a whole series, the second more precise when you're putting a handful of pictures together.

You stay in control while it runs: the arrow keys and the scroll wheel jump forward and back without ending the show. If it's playing, the timer for the current picture starts again after a manual jump.

That's also how you go through a selection at your own pace: S to start, S again straight away to pause - and now you page by hand through exactly those pictures.

That's what makes it useful in front of a client: you see your working environment, they see nothing but the picture.

The two windows stay connected. Page in the main window and the second one follows - whether you're in the grid, the loupe or editing. While you edit, the second screen shows the current state of your changes without the sliders and tools. Zooming and panning work there too.

If there's no second screen, the menu entry stays visible but grayed out, so it's clear the feature exists as soon as a monitor is plugged in.

6 Search

In an archive that has grown over the years you usually know roughly where something is, but not exactly. Search saves you the clicking: Ctrl+F opens a field, you type two characters, and the results are there.

FlashView searches folder and file names, ignoring case, across your whole library - not just the folder you happen to have open. The index lives in memory and is built in the background when you open your library. There's no database to maintain.

Both keys do the same thing. F3 is there as well because plenty of programs put search on it and fingers find it by themselves.

A folder result opens that folder. A file result jumps to the picture - if it lives somewhere else, FlashView switches to that folder and shows it. Whether you were in the grid or the loupe is preserved.

• Select marks the matches in the grid. From there you can rate, copy or export them together.
• Filter hides everything else. Your search term becomes a name filter, which you will find in the filter bar and can drop there again.

A zero in the brackets means your current folder has no match even though the search found some - they're elsewhere in your library. The buttons stay visible but do nothing.

7 Rating and marking

Culling is assembly-line work: look, decide, move on. This part of FlashView is built for exactly that - one key per decision, no menus, no waiting.

Color labels and pick/reject are toggles: the same key again takes the mark off. Press 6 twice and red goes on, then off. Stars work differently - each key sets its value, and 0 clears.

Stars are the common denominator across every program there is. Whatever you give here, any catalog will see. Color labels are freer: some people track editing status with them, others the client or the subject.

Pick and reject sit next to them and mean something else - not "how good" but "in" or "out". On a first pass through a series that's usually the only decision that counts.

• Keep it visible. R shows and hides the bar, as does the ★ button in the toolbar, which also indicates whether it's currently on.
• Bring it up briefly. In the loupe, just move the pointer to the bottom edge of the image. The bar appears for two seconds and goes away again.

A click sets the value outright rather than toggling it. Three stars stay three stars even if you click the same star twice. FlashView remembers separately whether the bar should be visible in the grid and in the loupe.

From then on every decision moves you forward: stars, color, pick, reject, and clearing them too. Even a 0 on an unrated picture moves on, because that was a decision as well. The mode only applies in the loupe and only to single pictures, not to a multiple selection.

There are two safeguards:

• Above 100 images FlashView asks first, naming the action and the count. That catches the accidental Ctrl+A.
• Above 500 images you get a progress bar as well.

Trigger another batch while one is still running and FlashView queues it. The status bar then shows how many operations are waiting. The order is preserved, and two batches never write to the same file at once.

With auto-advance on, undoing jumps the loupe back to the picture whose rating you just took away. So you're looking at the one you're about to decide on again.

• JPEG: the XMP block is embedded in the image file itself.
• RAW: a sidecar file name.xmp appears alongside. The raw file itself is never touched.

FlashView writes the fields other programs already read: xmp:Rating for stars, xmp:Label for the color label, xmpDM:pick and xmpDM:good for pick and reject. Those last two deliberately follow Lightroom's convention so your picks arrive there without a detour. Lightroom, Bridge and Capture One read all of it as it is.

8 Comparing images

A series rarely gives you two equally good frames - it gives you twenty similar ones: the dog running at you, the sports sequence, the turn in a dance. That's what compare is for: two pictures side by side at the same zoom, and a mechanic that lets you work through the whole series until the best one is left.

C turns it on and off again, from the grid as well as the loupe. Fewer than two images won't work, and FlashView says so.

The file name sits under each picture, the role above it. The active side is highlighted in blue - that's the one your key presses go to.

• The reference is your current benchmark. It stays put.
• The candidate is the challenger. It travels through the series.

When you switch compare on, the picture you were looking at becomes the reference and the next one becomes the candidate. The keyboard always acts on the candidate: ← and → move it through the folder, skipping the reference - the same picture never appears twice.

That's how you work through a series without thinking about it: if the candidate beats the reference, press ↑ - it becomes the new benchmark and the next one steps up. If it doesn't, press → and move on. What's left as the reference at the end is the best frame of the series.

The difference between the two keys is where you carry on afterwards:

• After ↑ the pass continues from where you were. The new benchmark is set, the order is untouched.
• After ↓ you carry on with the other picture. The roles have swapped, the position in the series stays.

• Shift+C switches between the two.
• Tab does the same. If the folder tree is showing, it joins the rotation.
• With the mouse: one click on the passive side makes it active. A second click zooms, just as it would in the normal loupe.

The pictures stay where they are; only the roles change. Which side the candidate starts on is set under Compare in the settings - the default is the right.

So you can score each of the two without leaving compare. The keyboard stays with the active side - the two work side by side.

The coupling works across different resolutions too, say when you hold a raw file against the camera's own JPEG - FlashView converts the position rather than counting pixels. You can switch it off in the loupe's context menu under Sync zoom, where it sits right next to Lock zoom, which holds the framing as you page.

9 Filtering and sorting

After rating comes narrowing down. The filter bar above the grid shows only the pictures you want to see - and the most important sentence about it is already in the program itself: it filters what's displayed, it doesn't rate anything. A filter never changes your pictures.

Filtering always applies to the folder you're looking at. All the criteria combine: four stars and a green label and shot last month.

Then click the number of stars you want. The empty circle on the right stands for unrated - useful for spotting what you haven't looked at yet.

"Four stars and up" is the classic for the selection that goes to the client. "One star at most" helps with the clear-out: anything still unrated after a pass can usually go.

Next to them sit the two switches for pick and reject, and they behave differently:

• ✓ filters for picks. Two states: off, or picks only.
• ⊘ filters for rejects. Three states: off, rejects only, hide rejects.

That third state on the reject filter is no accident. "Hide rejects" is the quiet helper on a second pass: the discards disappear from view without you having deleted anything. There's no reason, on the other hand, to want everything except the picks - which is why that switch has only two positions.

It cycles through three states: all formats, no RAW, RAW only. The label always tells you what's in force; Shift+J moves it on.

You need this in folders where every shot exists as a raw file and a JPEG. Without it, you see every subject twice.

You don't have to fill both: From alone means "from this day on", To alone means "up to this day". Both days are included.

Use it to pull the frames from one particular body out of a mixed folder, to see how a new lens is doing, or to check what was still usable at high ISO.

You can sort on five criteria, each ascending or descending: name, date, rating, color label and file size.

With the overlay open you can work without the mouse: ↑ and ↓ change the criterion, ← and → the direction.

Sorting is remembered per folder. A folder you left sorted by rating is sorted that way again next time you open it.

10 Files, clipboard and export

After the culling comes the rest of it: the good pictures go to the client, to the cloud or into the archive, and the discards go away. All of it happens in FlashView, without a trip to Explorer.

The first is the quick way into another program: WhatsApp Web, Signal, an email, a document. You copy the picture and paste it there, without exporting anything first.

The second is for when a program asks you for a file - an upload, a ticket system, the command line. Instead of typing the path out, you paste it.

In the loupe's context menu the two are called Copy image and Copy path.

That lets you chain filter and selection: narrow down first, then select everything, then export, rate or delete.

Nothing is deleted for good. If a raw file has a sidecar with your ratings next to it, that goes along too, so nothing is left orphaned.

The entry is in the grid's context menu as well, at the bottom and set apart by a separator.

That's what Copy to folder… in the grid's context menu is for. It copies your selection - or, if you haven't selected anything, the current picture. In other words exactly what Delete would hit, and deliberately not the whole filtered set.

Each picture travels with everything that belongs to it: the XMP file holding your ratings, the recipe of an edit and the edited version. What lands in the target folder is a complete set, not half of one.

As with the import, you can tick Verify copy - FlashView then reads every written file back and compares it. The run works in the background; the status bar shows the progress and, at the end, how many files were copied, skipped or failed.

Your source is unchanged and your folder stays open - you copy the picks out of the way and carry on culling.

Destination is chosen through Browse. FlashView remembers where you sent things last time and offers those again.

Naming either keeps the original names or numbers the files with a prefix of your choosing - Wedding001.jpg, Wedding002.jpg and so on. The sample line in the dialog shows what the first file will be called.

Resize is optional. With the box ticked you choose the long edge: 1024 px for the web, 2048 px for social media, and larger steps up to 4K. Nothing is ever scaled up - a smaller picture stays as it is.

JPEG quality defaults to 92, which is plenty for almost anything. Above that there's 95 and 100, below it 85 and 75.

An existing file is never overwritten; FlashView appends a number. The export runs in the background, you can carry on working, and the status bar shows the progress along with a way to cancel.

11 Getting pictures off the card

The first step after a shoot: card into the reader, pictures onto the disk. FlashView brings that with it, so you don't have to start another program just to end up back here for the culling.

You copy the entire contents of the card into one folder - complete, verified and in a single pass.

Ctrl+I opens the import, as does the toolbar button and Import from card… in the grid's context menu.

The dialog is deliberately short - four things to decide, and the rest looks after itself.

The destination is your archive. FlashView remembers the destinations you used last.

Once you've chosen the source it counts how many files are on the card and what dates they carry. The Destination line then shows the full path that will be created - before anything is copied.

With both switches off, the label becomes mandatory - otherwise there'd be no folder name at all. The dialog says so, and the import button stays disabled until you've typed something.

The date comes from the oldest file on the card, so from the start of the shoot.

Where a raw file and a JPEG belong to the same frame, they stay together, as do any sidecar files carrying ratings.

The card is only ever read. FlashView copies; it doesn't move anything and doesn't delete anything there - your card stays exactly as it was until you format it yourself.

It costs a little time and it's worth it: a loose USB card reader shows up during the import rather than weeks later when you open the file.

A file that fails all three attempts does not abort the import. At the end FlashView offers to retry the ones that failed.

Eject card after import unmounts the card at the end, the same as the icon in the taskbar does. Nothing is written to the card for that either.

12 Editing

Once the culling is done, a handful of pictures are left that still want something: a touch brighter, a level horizon, a tighter frame. You don't have to leave FlashView for that.

E opens the editor for the picture in the loupe. From the grid it's Edit in the context menu - editing always applies to a single picture.

It makes no difference whether you're on a JPEG or a raw file. FlashView brings a full raw developer with it and gets what's in the file out of it: highlights and shadows hold far more latitude there than in a finished JPEG.

The tools sit along the top - crop, straighten, redact and the two rotate buttons. The sliders for brightness, color and sharpness are on the right. Save and Cancel close the session from the top.

What you set is stored as a recipe next to the original - a small file holding your values. A finished JPEG with the result is written alongside it. The original itself is never touched.

Which brings the pleasant part: you can reopen an edit at any time and keep going. Every calculation starts again from the original, so nothing accumulates. Straighten by five degrees today and by eight later, and the picture is rotated by eight - not by thirteen.

The one you hand on is the _edit.jpg. The recipe is only for FlashView - it's the reason you can reopen and change the edit later.

Both companions belong to the original and travel with it when you copy, move or delete. Delete just the recipe and the edit is gone while the original stays.

• Save stores the recipe and the result and closes. E does the same.
• Cancel closes without saving. So does Esc - though in stages: if a tool is active, the first press only ends that tool.

Cancelling only discards what you changed in this session. An edit you saved earlier stays.

If you leave by some other route - double-clicking back to the grid, say - and there are unsaved changes, FlashView asks and offers three ways out: save, discard, or carry on after all.

You want that when two versions should stand side by side - color and black and white, square for Instagram and the original crop. The copy inherits the original's rating so it shows up in your filters.

The normal route stays Save: one edit, changeable at any time.

13 Crop, straighten, redact

Three tools in the top bar change neither color nor brightness but the picture itself: the framing, the tilt, and the parts that are nobody's business.

For a fixed aspect ratio pick one of the presets - 1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 or the original ratio. A button of its own swaps portrait and landscape without you having to drag again.

The crop only takes effect when you click Apply. Until then the frame is just a proposal you can move around as much as you like.

For fine work there's a slider as well, and a grid overlay you can switch on.

Not to be confused with the two rotate by 90° buttons, one each way. They tip the picture between portrait and landscape and work losslessly: they write the orientation into the file rather than recalculating any pixels.

Three styles are available:

A slider sets the strength. To remove a selected box, press Delete.

14 The sliders

The sliders live on the right of the edit mode. There are deliberately few of them, and each does exactly one thing.

Whatever you set here is reversible. Your values sit as a recipe next to the original, and every calculation starts there again. So you can keep adjusting as often as you like without anything piling up - and go back to the untouched picture at any point.

Highlights and shadows are the two that make the difference: they work at the ends rather than shifting the whole picture. A sky that's too bright comes down without the subject sinking into the dark.

Raw files add Tint, the second axis of white balance: it runs from green to magenta while warmth handles blue to yellow. Between them you can rescue shots taken under mixed lighting. JPEGs don't have that slider - there the white balance is already baked in.

On raw files FlashView applies a little of both from the start - a raw file is unprocessed and otherwise looks soft. Camera JPEGs stay at zero, because the camera has already sharpened them; going over that again would overcook it.

Vignette darkens the edges and draws the eye inwards. It only goes one way, into the dark. Over the first half of the slider the edge gets darker; over the second the effect reaches further towards the center of the frame.

The Auto button takes the judgement off your hands: FlashView measures the actual noise in the picture and sets both sliders to match. From there you can adjust.

The Strength slider underneath sets how far the look goes, so it can also be just hinted at.

With the black and white look that slider changes meaning: there it decides which color comes out bright in the conversion - like a color filter in front of the lens with black and white film.

Presets are named sets of your settings. You save your current values under a name and apply them to other pictures later - including to a whole selection in the grid at once. Presets you no longer need can be deleted.

For the quick case in between, copy the settings with Ctrl+Shift+C and paste them onto the next picture with Ctrl+Shift+V.

Working through a series is also helped by the slider positions staying put when you edit the next picture. Whatever suited one frame is already dialed in on the next one from the same series.

Getting rid of the edit as a whole is a different thing: for that there's Remove edit in the grid's context menu, which deletes the recipe and the result and leaves you with your photograph.

15 Developing raw files

Open a raw file for editing and FlashView calculates differently than it would for a JPEG. You won't notice: it's the same panel with the same sliders. The file decides, and there's no switch.

The difference is in what's being calculated. In a JPEG, white balance, contrast and color have already been fixed by the camera. In a raw file those decisions are still open, which is exactly why there's more to get out of it.

FlashView deliberately shows more than the camera's own JPEG does - the shadows in particular keep detail that others have already crushed. It holds back on contrast too. That's on purpose: you can always take away what's there, but you can't bring back what isn't.

Want it punchier? Two moves: Shadows down makes the darks solid again, Contrast up gives the picture as much bite as you like.

FlashView sets the black and white points itself - there are no sliders for those.

So raw follows the same rule as JPEG: the edit is reversible and lossless. You can reopen a development at any time and keep working on it - months later, when you want to output the picture larger or you've changed your mind about the crop. It's always recalculated from the raw file.

16 Editing elsewhere

Some things FlashView can't do: remove a distracting object, retouch at length, work with layers. For those you hand the picture to Photoshop and get the result back - without having to think about files.

FlashView bakes your existing edit in, writes a PSD file next to the original and starts the editor with it. That takes a moment - the status bar tells you what's happening. Photoshop then needs its usual start-up time on top.

The menu entry only exists in the loupe, and only if an editor was found.

From then on the picture behaves like any other: paging, zooming, rating and filtering all run at the usual speed. The PSD is converted this one time only - while you were in Photoshop anyway.

In the grid you see one entry for that: the PSD, shown with the contents of its converted version. Your original stays where it was, unchanged, with its own edit.

If an _ext.psd already exists, an _ext2.psd appears - an existing version is never overwritten.

You can also edit it like any other picture - with E and the same sliders. The same rule applies as everywhere else: your settings go into a recipe next to the file, the file itself is untouched, and everything stays changeable. That already holds when all you want to do is rotate it.

In Explorer you'll then see a file with the extension .fvedit appear - that's the recipe, a small text file holding your settings. It belongs to the picture and travels with it during file operations.

The edited button in the filter bar covers externally edited pictures too - as far as it's concerned, edited is edited, wherever it happened.

17 The whole route: from card to client

The chapters before this one explain each feature on its own. This one shows how they fit together - from the moment the card comes out of the camera to the files that land with your client.

The card import opens the target folder straight away and fills it while copying continues in the background, so stations 1 and 2 run into each other. You start culling before the card has finished.

That's precisely where FlashView comes in. The next picture is there when you press the arrow key, on raw files too, and in the thousands. With auto-advance it becomes a single motion: look, key, look, key.

When it comes to handing things over you have two routes, and they mean different things:

• Export creates new JPEGs at the size and quality you choose, without metadata. That's the version for the client, for the web, for the print lab.
• Copy to folder takes the files themselves, ratings and recipe included. That's the route when a set of pictures needs to move - into the archive, onto an external drive, into a shared folder.

After that everything carries on as usual: the result sits in the same folder and can be rated, filtered, edited further and exported.

18 Settings

You reach the settings through the cog on the right of the toolbar. Most of the defaults suit most people - what follows are the ones worth a look.

These are starting values. As soon as you change something within a folder, FlashView remembers it for that folder - the setting here only applies to folders you open for the first time.

Thumbnail controls how finely the previews are calculated:

On the very first start FlashView picks to suit your machine: Performance on a weaker one, Standard otherwise.

Which level suits you also depends on your column count: lots of narrow tiles don't need a high resolution. Show few large tiles on a high-resolution monitor with the processing power to match, and Hi-Res shows you noticeably more.

Only with this setting does the EXIF filter appear in the filter bar at all - without it, it's hidden.

It costs no speed; the values are picked up during the scan that runs anyway. It's still off by default, because it only matters to photographers who care.

Color labels compatible with decides what language color labels are written in. Lightroom (German localization) suits the German build of Lightroom; the other setting suits Bridge and other English-language programs. If your color labels turn up elsewhere as a plain white flag, this is why - reading, FlashView understands both spellings anyway.

The slideshow interval decides how long a picture stays up. That's a starting value too: you can change the pace directly while a slideshow is running.

Clearing costs nothing but processing time: the previews are rebuilt next time you open a folder, and your pictures and ratings aren't affected. If a folder is open at the time, the cache starts filling again straight away.

Clearing out is worth it in two cases: when a lot of folders have accumulated that you no longer need and space is getting tight - or after you've changed the thumbnail resolution, because the old sizes are still sitting there.

With Preview, a Preview count appears underneath - a dropdown offering 2, 4, 6, 8 and 12. The default is four.

Restart tour runs the short introduction that appears the first time you open a folder once more.

19 License and updates

FlashView runs for 60 days after installation, in full, with no restrictions and no watermark. After that you need a license key.

Everything to do with it sits in the about window: the ℹ on the right of the toolbar, next to the cog. That's where you'll find your version, your license status and the four buttons this chapter is about.

When the trial is running out, FlashView tells you in good time - with a note at startup during the last few days.

Keep that email. It's the only place the key exists, and you'll need it again when you move to another machine.

For that, the machine needs the internet once. Not afterwards: the certificate is local and is checked at every start without a connection.

A purchased license is valid indefinitely for the major version you bought it for, including every update within it. It also opens older versions, so a v2 license will start a v1 as well.

The clean route: release it first. While the old machine is still running, open the about window there and click Release license. FlashView asks once; after that the slot is free. On the new machine you enter the same key and everything is as it was.

The route for when the old machine is gone. Just enter the key on the new machine. FlashView notices that the license is still registered elsewhere and offers Move to this machine. One click, and the old slot is released.

The second route is the more convenient one, but it should stay the exception: it's limited in number, so a single key can't wander round an unlimited number of machines. If you regularly switch between two computers, release each time instead - that costs nothing and works without limit. If it does run out, an email to support will sort it.

Update & restart handles the rest on its own: download, signature check, install, restart. You don't have to fetch anything from the website or install anything by hand. Your settings, ratings and edits are untouched by it.

If you're impatient, use Check for updates in the about window. The button then either says Up to date or offers you the update.

20 All keyboard shortcuts

FlashView is built around the keyboard - when you're going through large numbers of pictures, every hand movement you save counts.

The number keys work on the numeric keypad too.