FastStone MaxView is an image viewer that also offers a decent set of editing tools. It doesn’t attempt to replace an image editing program, but it offers all you need to perform some quick adjustments while looking at your favorite pics.
Installation & Requirements
There’s not much to say about FastStone MaxView’s setup since it falls under the modern app install standards, meaning most of the process is automated. The program has very modest hardware requirements: 256 MB of RAM and at least 10 MB free storage space (who doesn’t have that nowadays?).
Also, it runs on many Windows editions from really old to really new: 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 (with support for touch interface).
Interface
FastStone MaxView has a clean interface with small icons and most functions hidden under menus to offer most of the space for its main purpose, viewing images. However, it’s not the only purpose since it includes plenty of image adjustments from essential ones such as rotate, flip and resize to color and lighting adjustments, sharpen/blur and even filters such as oil painting, sketch, gray scale, sepia and negative.
Concerning the viewer capabilities, FastStone MaxView lets you view images in fulscreen or slideshow, in Actual Size/Best Fit and easily zoom in/out using the +/- keys.
The Settings menu is crowded with options from simple ones such as remembering the last used folder and confirm on overwriting files to customizing the magnifier, configuring RAW file viewing and file associations as well as adding external image editors.
The toolbar offers navigation controls, some of the most commonly used editing actions such as crop, resize, draw, adjust color/lighting and other options like sharing via e-mail, printing and acquiring images from scanner.
FastStone MaxView also includes an offline Help file that lists the program’s mouse and keyboard controls among other aspects.
Pros
– Fast, simple installation.
– Clean UI with most features available in menus to preserve screen space for displaying images.
– Includes a robust set of editing options such as resize, crop, rotate, adjust color/lighting, sharpen/blur and filters.
– Almost all actions have a keyboard or mouse shortcut assigned.
– Lets you view images inside ZIP and RAR archives.
– The Settings menu offers lots of customization possibilities.
Cons
– None worth mentioning
Conclusion
FastStone MaxView is definitely more than an image viewer, since it also includes editing tools and capabilities such as viewing inside archives and acquiring images from scanners.
