FastStone Image Viewer vs Photonix

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.

Photonix is an open-source photo manager for storing, presenting, searching and rediscovering collections through a web browser. It runs on Android, iOS, the web and a self-hosted server. Classifiers identify faces, objects, image styles, colors and locations so photos can be filtered in several ways. Face recognition groups faces across images, and people can label those groups without training a model. Photonix compares metadata to identify related versions, including RAW files, camera JPEGs and edits, and watches selected folders for changes made in Lightroom, Darktable or Photoshop without plugins. The maker says object detection and photo analysis run on the installed server, while account, metadata and app data remain on installation machines and chosen backups. Major RAW formats include CR2, NEF, DNG, ARW and RWL. Mobile apps require a Photonix server.