"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| I've now looked at it (well, the webpage - I've not installed it); from
| the list of features, it looks _very_ like IrfanView, with one exception
| for me: multilevel undo/redo. (Which is something IrfanView has lacked
| for some time: it has undo, but only one level.)
|

I think this has been talked about before. Once you
need multi-undo, you probably need an image editor
and not a viewer. IV is a wonderful program that can
do all sorts of things, but using it as an editor is a
case of diminishing returns.


The learning curve is somewhat extreme with
graphic editors, so a lot of people prefer to try to
stretch IV. IV will certainly stretch. But there's a
limit.

For editing there's GIMP, Paint.net, free older
versions of PSP, reasonably priced current versions
of PSP, and probably other good software.

No one needs to try to shoehorn
graphic editing into a viewer. Nor is it necessary to
jump from viewer functionality to overpriced, limited
Adobe products. In general it's not even necessary to
spend money. Graphic operations, for the most part,
are relatively simple and rely on old technology, so
there's a lot of software around.

George P has presented a good example of what
IV is good for: He has 50 screenshots. He doesn't
care what format they are. JPG? Then he's going to
damage them, at least slightly, in the cropping and
resaving. He doesn't care. He apparently has no
plans to touch them up or try to improve them. He
doesn't need good pictures. He just wants to quickly
crop 50 low-grade images. That's a good job for IV.
But if he wanted to do things like brighten, sharpen,
crop intelligently, add text, paste in sections, etc
then he'd be much better off with a full graphic editor
rather than trying to do all that in IV.

To my mind FastStone is a remnant of an earlier
time. Like WinZip, it dates to a time 20 years ago
when the functionality it provides wasn't available
without paying a fairly high price. Windows could
display a BMP, GIF, or JPG back then. That was
about it.
FastStone is free for home use, but that's a bit
silly. They're trying to maintain an outdated business
model. Like buying MS Office Home for $150 rather
than using Libre Office. Even after paying $150, MS
would be claiming I can't legally write a business
letter, create a contract DOC, or design my own
business cards with their software. FastStone is
claiming I can only use their software to look at
pictures and can't do anything that could somehow
lkead to someone making money. Which means I
couldn't even look at pictures if I were doing it at
work. It's a ridiculous and even somewhat sleazy
licensing limitation.