A while ago, I introduced "My Favorite Screenshot Software FastStone Capture." Today, I will introduce another image viewer developed by the same author, FastStone Image Viewer. This software is completely free for non-commercial use, but it only supports the Windows operating system.

Download FastStone Image Viewer

My Use Case

I usually sync my phone photos to a NAS (Synology) for backup. Synology comes with a built-in photo album software that can recognize and categorize images, but the scanning speed is slow and the image viewing is not convenient. So I found FastStone Image Viewer to compensate for the shortcomings of the QTS built-in photo album software. The advantage of FastStone Image Viewer lies in image viewing and editing.

If you need to view and edit images in the NAS through FastStone Image Viewer on Windows, you only need to share the NAS folder via SAMBA and then map it to Windows. Refer to: "Mapping SAMBA Shares as Network Drives in Windows 10." After mapping, you can view and edit images in the NAS using FastStone Image Viewer just like local images.

FastStone Image Viewer reads folders on Windows (including mapped network drives) in a tree menu. After selecting a directory, it can quickly display thumbnails for preview, making it easy to find the images you want to view or operate.

FastStone Image Viewer also comes with simple image editing features, but I don't use them much. If you are interested, you can try them yourself.

Summary

• FastStone Image Viewer can read network mapped drives.
• FastStone Image Viewer can quickly output thumbnails for a specified folder, making it easy to preview.
• FastStone Image Viewer does not support categorization and search.

If you like automatic photo categorization and image recognition, you can also try Google Photos. However, there may be network and privacy issues, so it is generally recommended to use local image viewers like FastStone Image Viewer.