Why should it be different with photographs? I suspect the answer to that is that we accumulate huge quantities of photographs (that we may or may not want to edit) and that the sheer volume of them makes it difficult to find anything. If you open a Word document you know exactly where you loaded it from and exactly what the file is called and where it is stored when you finish. Sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? Microsoft Office doesn’t attempt to completely take over the organisation of your Excel spreadsheets or your Word documents. I want to see a clear “1:1 relationship” between an image that I can see on the screen and the file in which it is held on the computer. I don’t like this – and neither do lots of other people. You do things their way and you trust that the program is keeping track of where everything is. This applies to Google Picasa and it applies to Mac’s iPhoto. “Photography software” tends to completely take over the storing of your images and you have to do things their way. I’ve been searching on and off for a month or so to see if I can find a Mac equivalent as I’m moving all my own photography onto my Macbook Pro (as there’s no doubt at all that my pictures look much better on a Mac than on any PC that I have ever owned). So surprised, in fact, that I searched my website two or three times (using the search function at the righthand side of every page at to make sure I’m not having a senior moment. I’m very surprised to find that I haven’t previously blogged about Faststone Image Viewer.

Faststone Image Viewer is an excellent, free, image viewer and editor for Windows

Faststoneimage viewer