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IrfanView is a fast and compact image editor cum viewer of all time. It is best for use of beginners to professionals. IrfanView supports almost every image format available; moreover plugins are available to enhance the support. IrfanView is well suited for single image editing tool to multi batch image processing.
If you’re working with images and computers for sometime you must have explored about this tool long back before. It is the cool tool for image editing for all ages right from Windows 9x to VISTA. Now we have a great news as well; latest version of IrfanView 4.-0 has been released. You can download the installation file right here. This release is little bulkier than all its previous release I believe. The size of the IrfanView installer is 1.10 MB (first time reaching Megabytes). This may be because of the improved Vista compatibility in the new release.
IrfanView is written by Irfan Skiljan, a graduate student of Vienna University of Technology. This compact software is completely free for non-commercial use. The development is supported by donation; feel free to donate towards this. IrfanView is especially useful when working with digital photos and their retouching. My top use of IrfanView is to watermark and resize my entire digital collection; so it is ready for Web.
Features Glimpse
- Many supported file formats ( almost every image format)
- Multi-language support
- Thumbnail / Preview option
- Slideshow (Save as EXE / SCR)
- Fast directory browsing
- Batch conversion / editing
- Multipage editing
- File search
- Email Option
- Multimedia Playe (plays popular video)
- Change color depth
- Scan Support
- Cut/Crop
- IPTC editing
- Capturing
- Lossless JPG operations
- Effects (sharpen, blur, Adobe Photoshop filters)
- Extracts icons from EXE/DLL
- Lot of shortcut keys for ease of use
- Command line options for experts
- Customized plugins
Edward de Leau lists the 10 ways of using IrfanView. He writes clearly about how IrfanView can help in day to day image processing needs. Here is the quick summary on how IrfanView can be used,
- To take Screenshots
- To preview, sort, rotate albums
- To resize image
- To create thumbnails for online photo album
- To scan image
- To watermark my photographs
- To preform batch processing
- To apply effects / filters
- To set Windows wallpaper
- To do lot more with the image
Update:- Pallab has written a Ten Things you can do with Irfanview with more explanation.
IrfanView has been around for many years and keeps getting better. It might still require lot of improvement towards the UI. Hope it gets better too.
IrfanView is my favorite when it comes to basic image editing / viewing. If you never tried it before give a try today. Visit their homepage.
Tags: image_editor, irfanview, review, Software
The great thing about irfanview is lightweight which we can’t get it from most advanced image browsers. XNView is good alternative find and thanks for sharing.
