IrfanView
IrfanView (pronounced "EarfanView") has long held a great reputation among photographers for being a fast, lightweight image viewer, with IPTC editing and an excellent range of often innovative features. Over many years it has constantly offered pioneering features: for example, it was the world's first viewer to offer animated GIF support. Limited editing facilities include sharpen, blur, rotate, and crop. There are good file searching features, an email option, multimedia player and lots of shortcuts to speed the workflow. All its features are carefully explained on the developer's website.
IrfanView supports plugins to add multimedia players, filters, email, Exif, and FTP, all of which can be downloaded as a single file. It reads 100+ formats and writes most major formats including JPEG 2000 and (with plugin) PDF. It accepts many plugins which greatly extend its functionality.
Comment
With "a million downloads per month" since 2003, IrfanView is one of the most popular pieces of photo-related software around. Its interface is unusual in that it adjusts the window size to the size of the images, displaying them on your desktop as large as possible.
Tech info
- OS: Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Windows 7
- Price level: FREE for non-commercial use
Irfan Skiljan
Austrian developer Irfan Skiljan says he has had many thousands of emails congratulating him on IrfanView, software he continues to develop and improve.
From the same vendor:
- Toolbar skins for IrfanView
©trl