"occam" wrote

| Which is better? IV will easily allow for going through
| photos in a folder. FS will show them all as thumbnails
| and loads them quickly.
|
| Faststone is nothing like Picasa. It is not a 'busybody' program which
| tries to take over your image files like Picasa. Picasa is a typical
| Google program for people who like to be mothered.

I'd agree with that. Picasa is in a category described with
the absurdly valorizing term of "asset management". It's
Explorer for dummies, finding photos on disk for people who
have no idea how to do it themselves.

But FS does use an Explorer-style interface in order to
combine search and viewing in one window. There's nothing
wrong with that. I'm just saying it's a lot more functionality
than some people need. It's more than just an image viewer.
I know where my images are. I
don't need to search an Explorer treeview to find them.
I don't want a big window showing all the images in a folder.
So I just use IrfanView for viewing because all I want is
a simple, quick, light program that can paint any image
onscreen when I double-click the file. And IV's ability to
move through a folder is good enough for what I do. But
if you do a lot of searching through folders then FS, with
it's well designed thumbnail display, might be more handy.