Software update: FastStone Image Viewer 4.0

FastStone Soft released version 4.0 of its popular Image Viewer program on Thursday. FastStone Image Viewer is free, small and fast, and packed with thoughtful functionality for viewing and editing images, such as rotating (lossless for jpeg), cropping, resizing, removing the red eye effect, rotating the photo at any angle to correct camera ‘skew’ and adjust colors, contrast and brightness. Since version 3.8, the user interface is multilingual, eliminating the need for a separate download per language. The following changes and improvements have been made in this release:

Changes in version 4.0:

• Enhanced the skins and toolbar icons. Now the windows have drop shadow effect in Vista and Windows 7
• Added “Search and Replace” to Batch Rename
• Added “Renaming Preview” to Batch Rename
• Enhanced “Conversion Preview” in Batch Convert. Now it is possible to compare the original and converted images side by side
• In Advanced Options for Batch Convert, added an option to specify whether color adjustments (brightness, contrast, sharpening etc.) should be made before or after resizing.
• Shows GPS information in the “Image Properties” window. A “Show in Google Earth” button will be available if the image has GPS information
• Added “Border Effects” under Edit menu
• Added an option to remove EXIF/IPTC data when emailing images
• Added shortcuts for favorite folders
• Improved performance on network folders
• Improved compatibility with Windows 7
• Fixed bugs
• Other minor improvements

FastStone Image Viewer 4.0, click on the image for a larger version.