Saturday, March 01, 2008

IrfanView 4.10 - Full-featured Graphics Viewer

IrfanView is one of the most popular and feature packed free image viewer, editor and converter for Windows. This fast and compact program is trying to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.
IrfanView supports all important graphic formats, as well as multiple media formats.
In addition it includes many additional features including image editing, image adjustment, slideshow, batch conversion and editing, multipage editing, drag and drop support, TWAIN support, fast directory browsing, IPTC edit, capturing, numerous effects, multiple language support, and much more. Moreover, the functionality of IrfanView can be further extended via plug-ins that are widely available.
Lets take a closer look at this program.
The user interface of IrfanView is not streamlined, but it is simple and quite easy to use.
As I mentioned above IrfanView allows you to open image files, as well as sound and video files of multiple formats.

IrfanView Open dialog


Thumbnails shortcut on the toolbar lets you view thumbnails of images in the specified directory.

IrfanView Thumbnails View


IrfanView allows you to create slide shows. There are several options for slideshow. For example, you can set time interval for changing slides or use MP3 files (with installed plug-ins) as background music. You can also save the current slideshow as self running EXE or SCR file (standalone executable/screen saver).

IrfanView SlideShow


IrfanView is not only the viewer, but also a converter of graphic files. In the program there is a batch processing option with the possibility of converting incoming files of different formats into a single output format. You also can apply many special operations to the images during conversion. Furthermore, IrfanView has batch rename feature that lets you rename original/input files or copy/move original files to output directory and rename the files in the output directory. For renaming, you can generate a name pattern for new names and the starting index for numbers.

IrfanView Batch Processing


Another IrfanView’s useful feature is called Copy Shop. It allows you to print an image directly from a scanner or any other TWAIN compatible device (digital camera, TV card, etc.).
Though IrfanView is not a professional graphic editor, it still allows you to do some useful image editing tasks. You can cut and crop images, paint or draw objects into an image, insert text. IrfanView also lets you to rotate, flip, resize images, create panoramas and apply different effects like sharpen, blur, emboss and others.

IrfanView Image Effects


The program has many others useful features.
IrfanView is my favorite image viewer, because it offers really good options and features for free and because it is the fastest picture viewer I can find.

You can download IrfanView from this page or from the official web site irfanview.com.

See also: XnView 1.92 – The Universal Graphic Viewer and Converter

1 comment:

Ben said...

IrfanView is a great alternative to Photoshop and Gimp for the less experienced user who doesn't need the full suite of editing tools.

If you just wanna spruce up a holiday photo real quick, you don't want a host of complicated features, but a quick way to convert/organize/lightly edit the photo, and IrfanView provides in that regard.