Select Churches from South Carolina

I like to photograph churches. The neat thing is that many are beautiful architectural and historical buildings. And most don't require a ticket to see and photograph. I have traveled around mid and upstate South Carolina taking pictures of churches. I choose churches with interesting styles and features. I have created several books which are available on Magcloud. Click Select Churches from South Carolina to have a look.

Shuffle images in folder using Faststone Image Viewer

This past weekend, I was creating slideshows from some of my images. I was using Lightroom 4. The slideshow module in LR4 does a pretty decent job, but is limited in transition and pan and zoom effects. So I searched for some other solutions. Of all the solutions I downloaded and tried, on LR4 had the "image shuffle" feature. I think this should be a very common feature but it isn't, at least not in the software I tried.

How to shuffle image files? Use Faststone Image Viewer. I have talked about this versatile program before. Here's how I did it.

1) Export jpg's of my images from LR4 to a folder on the desktop.
2) Right click on the folder and select "Browse with Faststone"
3) In Fastsone Image Viewer, select all images

4) Press "F7" to shuffle images

5) Select all images. Select "Tool" then "Batch Rename All Images" (F4)

6) Select "Rename"

7) Now the folder will have the shuffled images.

Update on Faststone Image Viewer

I last wrote on FastStone Image Viewer (FIV) in 2009. You can find that post here. I still use FIV frequently in my daily life at work and home. It is a fantastic free tool. While looking at the site the other day I discovered they have some good documentation that I had overlooked before. They have a good tutorial which is downloadable as a pdf and other formats.

This goes over most of the features and is a good reference.