FastStone Image Viewer vs Photo Mechanic

FastStone Image Viewer is a Windows image browser, converter, and editor for individual images and collections. Editing tools include resizing, rotation, cropping, color adjustment, sharpening, blur, Clone Stamp, and Healing Brush. It supports major graphic formats and popular camera RAW formats, including HEIC, WEBP, PDF, SVG, and JPEG XL. The Compare Images feature displays up to four pictures side by side, while batch tools convert and rename collections. Slideshows offer more than 150 transition effects and music. The program can acquire images from scanners and batch scan to PDF, TIFF, JPEG, or PNG. Users can launch external editors from within Image Viewer, and a portable version can run from removable storage. FastStone lists personal and educational use as free and a commercial lifetime license at $34.95 as a one-time purchase, with upgrades free. Another plan listing gives a price of $34.95 a month, so the commercial license terms should be confirmed before purchase. The product is listed for Windows, and FastStone provides technical support by email.

Photo Mechanic is a media browser for viewing, organizing, managing, and exporting digital photos on macOS and Windows. During ingest from memory cards, users can view thumbnails, cull, rate, and tag pictures while copying them. Metadata features include captions, copyright, keywords, IPTC fields, variables, structured keyword lists, and code replacements. Batch editing can copy, delete, tag, watermark, rename, resize, or add IPTC metadata to multiple images.

The software can apply saved GPS tracking logs and add city, state, and country names to photo metadata. It uploads directly to services including PhotoShelter, Zenfolio, Amazon S3, Flickr, and SmugMug, can send files through an existing SMTP email server, and can make web galleries from templates. Photo Mechanic Plus adds an image database for cataloging pictures across storage locations.