Thanks for your replies and advice. What I really want is the acility
that Thumbsplus has in which you can set it not to automatically
create thumbnails. You can then highlight individual files/icons and
select 'Make Thumbnails' to create thumbnails just for those files.
(there is also a 'make all' type of option too of course). The reason
I prefer having that level of control is that if I download a few
images from a lot of sets in a group or groups, I like to be able to
view just a few at a time to decide whether to download the rest of
the set or not. It's just a preference having seen that facility in
Thumbsplus.
The drawbacks of Irfanview is that it only retains thumbnails for the
active folder so has to recreate them every time you change to a
different folder and with Faststone, when it is creating a lot of
thumbnails it insists on scrolling the display to where it is
currently creaing thumbnails so it is very difficult to browse while
it is creating hundreds of thumbs. These are both incidental but just
a couple of drawbacks to me - I guess I want the luxury of Thumbsplus
without having to pay $70-80.
Thanks again for your advice chaps.