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IrfanView

irfanview.com

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Re: IrfanView

#81
I've been using IrfanView since at least 1997, if not earlier in 1996.

I still use IrfanView to this day. It's my Swiss knife for a lot of simple photo editing work (cropping, resizing, padding, text-adding, etc), batch-processing, and for browsing single photos through directories.

It's not just good, it's way faster than the bloated alternatives.

To top it off, IrfanView works beautifully on my Linux via Wine, and also on my Mac M1/M2 machines (and as a tool quicker than even Mac's own Preview). It's a primary install for me, whichever any platform I'm working on; and a software that's truly a gift to the world.

Re: IrfanView

#82

Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best image viewer in town, on Windows at least

IMO it's up there, I've been using it for over 20+ years.

IrfanView and foobar2000 (mp3 player) haven't left my side since I started using them. Ditto (clipboard manager) has also earned its place.

Re: IrfanView

#83
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative?

The built-in viewer in windows is fine. I can't really think of a feature that it doesn't have that I need. Could you say why irfanview gets your vote?

It's about speed mostly. And I got used to the shortcuts, ctrl+r to resize, 'i' to check image metadata. I don't really use any of the editing features (I use Paint.NET for edits). In theory I don't need a dedicated image viewer but I like IrfanView so much that I even paid for it so I can have it on company's laptop.

Re: IrfanView

#84
post #82

Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best image viewer in town, on Windows at least

IMO it's up there, I've been using it for over 20+ years. IrfanView and foobar2000 (mp3 player) haven't left my side since I started using them. Ditto (clipboard manager) has also earned its place.

To add to that, for me mplayer was clutch for a long time, nowadays I opt for VLC though.

Re: IrfanView

#85
post #38

That’s a name I have not heard in a long while. I used to use it back on Windows 95 because it was a faster way to view JPEGs than opening Internet Explorer. Everything about that makes me feel old.

Still a part of the standard software I install on every new install.

As an only occasional windows user, I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing such a list, maybe in a GitHub gist if you find yourself bored one day :)

Re: IrfanView

#86
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What flickering do you have? I don't see any. As for startup time, I dunno, seems to open in less than half a second for me, though on a relatively high end laptop. On a 10 year old machine it might suffer.

I rarely use Windows these days, but IrfanView feels lightning fast compared to the built-in Photos app or whatever they call it. I started using IV I think on Win 98 and it's still as snappy and reliable as it always has been.

I haven't used the latest Windows viewer because I'm no longer prepared to upgrade to the latest versions of Windows, but the old version was a dog of a program compared to IrfanView, it was slow, couldn't display many formats and would misbehave if the image files were damaged.

And yes, at times it flickers and or images can tear.

Re: IrfanView

#87
post #80
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing even if they knew the tool existed they would still rather ask you to do it. Not everyone wants to understand computers or download programs

More importantly, not everybody wants to be entirely self reliant. They're ok with small task delegation.

Sometimes you don’t realize things about yourself until someone else puts it into words. Thank you, internet stranger

Re: IrfanView

#88
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative?

The built-in viewer in windows is fine. I can't really think of a feature that it doesn't have that I need. Could you say why irfanview gets your vote?

Install it and you'll see within 5-10 minutes the next time you have go through a bunch of images, or do something to a bunch of images.

IrfanView likely still supports more formats, since it was earlier than any other tool. This means any edge cases in file encoding that might not work, or render ideally likely has been solved there first.

It probably has some batch file conversion tricks in it too.

IrfanView also provided for free for a lot of years what was hard to get without paying. If it existed on mac I'd be all over it.

Ah, the windows viewer always wasn't that good.

And if I remember the big first improvement of it was copying a lot of IrfanView.

Since this post, I remembered another old friend that was excellent on windows, AcdSEE. Also worth looking into.

Re: IrfanView

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The built-in viewer in windows is fine. I can't really think of a feature that it doesn't have that I need. Could you say why irfanview gets your vote?

The batch image manipulation features it offers are pretty handy. Plus you can press L or R to rotate an image and it has lossless rotate options as well.

I'm pretty sure it had batch processing capabilities before Photoshop.

Re: IrfanView

#90
post #34

IrfanView is one of my "must to have apps", going back to Win 98. For simple image editing (resizing, cropping etc) and batch processing, it's though to beat. Now I mostly work on macOS, and miss it. I guess XnView is close enough.

Same, using it since 1998 (I was 9, 35 now).

Any windows PC I use doesn't feel right without the irfanview logo somewhere.

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