Windows 10 & 11 · macOS 12+ (Apple Silicon)

A culling tool built for the job, next to FastStone.

FastStone Image Viewer is a genuinely good image viewer, and it is free for personal use. We built PhotoTaken for one job it was never meant to do: ripping through a full card, keeping the good frames, and handing them to your editor. Here is an honest look at where each one fits.

Try it free for 14 days See the full PhotoTaken site

WHY PHOTOGRAPHERS CULL ELSEWHERE

A great viewer is not a culling workflow

FastStone opens almost anything, fast, and costs nothing for personal use. If you mainly need to browse, view, and do light edits, it is hard to beat on price. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

Culling is a different job. You load a card, race through a few thousand frames, rate the shots you'll use, reject the rest, and move on. Our app (called PhotoTaken) is built around that one loop: RAW and JPEG show as a single tile and rename together, card ingest copies to two drives and verifies the copy before you trust it, and your ratings and color labels are written to standard XMP. Because the picks travel in XMP, they show up in Lightroom, Capture One, or Bridge when you open the same files. FastStone keeps its tags in its own database, so those picks stay put and do not follow the photos into your editor.

PhotoTaken vs FastStone

Side by side, honestly.

FastStone wins on price and on editing, and it is free for personal use. We are faster and safer for the specific job of culling a shoot and handing it off.

	PhotoTaken	FastStone
Free for personal use	—	✓
Built-in photo editing (crop, resize, red-eye, convert)	—	✓
Purpose-built culling workflow (rate, reject, rip through a card)	✓	~
RAW + JPEG shown as one tile, renamed and moved together	✓	—
Ratings and color labels written to portable XMP	✓	—
Verified two-drive card ingest (copy once, land on two drives, checksum-verified)	✓	—
One-time purchase, no subscription	✓	✓

✓ Yes ~ Partial or with caveats (hover for detail) — No

The bottom line

Which one you actually need

If you want a free, fast, do-a-bit-of-everything image viewer, FastStone is a solid pick and we would not talk you out of it. If culling is the part of your day that hurts, and you want RAW+JPEG handled as one, ingest you can trust, and picks that follow your files into your editor, that is exactly what we built PhotoTaken to do. Plenty of photographers keep both: FastStone for quick viewing, PhotoTaken for the cull.

Questions

What people ask before they try it.

Mostly some version of: FastStone is free, so what am I paying for.

FastStone is free. Why would I pay for this?

Because this is built for one job rather than many. RAW and JPEG behave as a single shot, ingest copies to two drives and verifies both, and your picks are written where your editor can read them.

If you want a fast general viewer that does a bit of everything, FastStone is free and solid, and we would not talk you out of it.

Is this a replacement for FastStone?

For culling a shoot, yes. For its editing odds and ends, no. There is no crop, resize or red-eye here, because the job stops at handing the shots you'll use to the editor you already use.

Do my ratings and labels carry over?

Yes. We write standard XMP, embedded for JPEG and TIFF and as a sidecar for RAW, so the stars and labels you set while culling travel with the files.

What does it run on?

Windows 10 and 11, and macOS 12 or later on Apple Silicon. One purchase covers both machines.

Is it a subscription?

There is a 14-day trial of the Pro edition, with no credit card. After that it is $69 for Light or $189 for Pro, bought once. No subscription, and every feature on the roadmap arrives as a free update.