FastStone Image Viewer 6.5 is the latest version of the media viewer for Microsoft's Windows operating system. The new version of the application supports the importing of video files, improved the slideshow functionality and the internal video player.

If you ask one hundred Windows users about the media viewer they use to view images, you will probably get more than twenty different answers.

Some may use the Photos application that Microsoft integrated in newer versions of Windows; others may run third-party programs like XnView, Fast Picture Viewer, IrfanView, or FastStone Image Viewer.

I reviewed FastStone Image Viewer in 2009 for the first time on this site and followed development ever since. The developer released version 6.0 in 2016. Video player support was added in FastStone Image Viewer 6.3 in 2017, and the new version is the first release of the media viewer in 2018.

FastStone Image Viewer 6.5

FastStone Image Viewer 6.5 is available as a portable version and an installer. I suggest you download and use the portable version; it has a size of 8 Megabytes and can be run after download and extraction of the downloaded archive.

The program displays folders of the main partition of the system and available images in those folders in the interface on start.

You can use the folder browser in the sidebar to open different folders on the same or other drives, or click on any folder in the main pane to look at thumbnails of available images it contains.

The main feature addition in FastStone Image Viewer 6.5 is support for video imports. You could use the program previously to import images and photos from external media such as digital cameras or smartphones that you connected to the device the image viewer was running on.

Select File > Import Photos and Videos to start a new import process.

The new version adds options to include captured or downloaded videos in the process as well; you may use the internal video player to play these files right away. The changelog lists enhancements to the video player as another improvement in the new version but does not provide further information.

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The third and final improvement increases the maximum time interval of slideshows from five minutes to one hour. You can create slideshows in FastStone Picture Viewer with a click on Create at the top and the selection of Slide Show Builder from the menu that opens when you do.

From there it is just a matter of adding files or folders with images to the slideshow, and setting various parameters such as transition effects, whether images should be resized, and the time per slides.

You cannot set the total playtime of slideshows as it is determined by the number of images and the time each image is displayed when the slideshow runs.

Closing Words

FastStone Image Viewer 6.5 is another high-quality release that improves the media viewer further. If you use or like the new video import function or slideshow improvements, you may want to give this a try even if you use a different media viewer.