1 Getting started

FlashView is a fast image viewer for Windows. Point it at a folder and the pictures are there - no library, no catalog, no import step, and no waiting when you page through them.

Start big. Don't open a single shoot: open the top folder of your whole archive and switch on Recursive in the toolbar. Twenty years of pictures then sit in front of you as one surface, grouped by year and scrollable in one go. Hardly any other program gives you that view, because they all want to build a catalog first. And since browsing costs you nothing, looking for one picture quickly turns into wandering through the lot.

• 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 folder is there immediately, no matter how many pictures are in 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. By default the tree is visible in the grid but not in the loupe, where the space belongs to the picture. Either setting can be changed at any time and is remembered.

Tab moves back and forth between the tree and your images. Together with G and L for the view, that gets you through an entire culling session without leaving the keyboard.

← and → page through, Home and End jump to the first and last image. The scroll wheel scrolls the grid and changes the picture in the loupe. Esc takes you back one step.

Ctrl+scroll changes the thumbnail size - skim a series with small tiles, then go bigger when you want a closer look.

It's the quickest focus check there is: no zooming first and then hunting for the spot you cared about.

2 Culling

This is the part that eats your evening: finding the twenty keepers among two thousand frames. In FlashView it's one key per decision.

They're independent of each other - a picture can carry four stars, a green label and a pick all at once.

Prefer the mouse? R brings up the rating bar and you click straight into it. In the loupe you can also just move the pointer to the bottom edge of the image - the bar appears for two seconds.

Ctrl+Z undoes the last rating, batch operations included, and jumps back to the picture in question.

On the left you set the number of stars and whether you mean ≥, = or ≤. Next to that sit the color labels and the switches for picks and rejects. Everything combines.

Clear drops all filters at once.

1. Set the reject switch ⊘ to rejects only - the grid now holds exactly the discards.
2. Press Ctrl+A, then Delete.
3. Confirm, and everything lands in the Windows recycle bin. Nothing is deleted for good.

Note that Ctrl+A selects the visible images only, meaning whatever your filter left standing. That's exactly why this works.

3 Editing and sharing

A handful of pictures survive the cull. Some of them need a little work - and then they need to reach someone.

Open a raw file and you get a full raw development instead, using the same sliders, with all the latitude a raw file carries.

The important part: your original is never changed. Your settings are stored as a recipe alongside it, and a finished JPEG is written next to that. You can reopen any edit later and keep adjusting.

E saves and closes, Esc discards.

You pick the destination folder, whether to keep the original names or number the files, whether to scale them down, and at what JPEG quality. New files are written; your originals stay untouched.

4 What else FlashView does

That's everything you need day to day. When you want more, it's there:

The full manual covers each of these in detail, along with the settings and license handling. You'll find it at flashview.net.

F1 brings this list up inside FlashView whenever you need it, so there's nothing to memorise.