IrfanView

Description

IrfanView is a fast, compact, small and free (for non-commercial use) image viewer and converter that will work on almost all Microsoft Windows versions (including XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11).

A powerful graphics viewer, designed from scratch to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals. IrfanView is the first Windows graphics viewer that comes with support for multiple (animated) GIF, Multipage TIF, and Multiple ICO. It has support for many graphics file formats.

Just a couple of them: BMP, DIB, JPG, JPEG, PSD, PDF, GIF, TTF, TXT, ANI, CUR, CLP, DDS, CAM, Mac PICT, QTIF, MP4, WAD, WBMP, RAS, SUN, SFF, PPM (and many other graphics file formats supported).

Support has been extended over the years for video and audio files. Just a short list of them: WAV, AVI, WMA, WMV, MPG, MPEG, MP3, MID, and many others.

It offers support for many languages, has preview and paint tools (you can draw arrows, lines or circles, etc.), toolbar skins, and the slideshow is also present in this free and powerful graphics software.

Also, it has support for Adobe Photoshop Filters software, Batch conversion (with its image processing), email, file search, printing, it can change color depth, it can add effects (Blur, Filter Factory, Sharpen, etc.). Capturing, extracting icons from DLL, EXE, ICLs are just a couple of other features that come with this free graphics software.

Please note that according to Irfan the standard IrfanView version includes only the most essential PlugIns: Effects, Paint, Icons, Slideshow-EXE, RegionCapture Tools, Video, Metadata, and JPG-Transform.

IrfanView Review

If you are on the prowl for a free image editing tool, IrfanView software might be just what you are looking for. Years ago, IrfanView was strictly used as an image viewing tool. Nowadays, it has extensive editing capabilities. Both beginners and professionals alike will find that IrfanView provides considerable assistance for image editing.

Basic Design

Aside from empowering users to view and edit images, IrfanView also lets them read and save an array of video, graphics and audio files. However, it is necessary to use some plug-ins to view certain file types. This no-cost visual tool is supported by Windows OS including Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11. The program can also run with Mac OS X Winebottler and Linux's Wine.

Support

Aside from providing support for many file extensions, the software also offers multi-language support, Adobe Photoshop Filters support, an uber-popular slide show, the ability to save SCR / EXE files, the capacity to burn files to CDs and DVDs and a function to draw shapes on-screen. A full installation of IrfanView with all of its features and plug-ins takes up considerably less space than a lot of competing image viewers. Thankfully, the software is easy to install. All one has to do is click the executable file and install.

Image Editing

IrfanView has an array of image editing options. It is also capable of directing images to be opened through existing external graphics editors like Photoshop. Open a picture, and you'll see a status bar that provides the beginning size in pixel dimensions as well as the bits per pixel. The program displays an abundance of other information like zoom, image number in the folder, file date/time, etc. Go ahead and edit the image as you desire.

Editing is made easy thanks to the program's clean and straightforward interface. Just click the toolbars and menu to access editing options. You can rotate, apply watermarks, tweak the filters, add brightness, modify the color depth, flip, alter the canvas size or create picture frames with your customized colors and sizes.

It doesn't have exceptional painting abilities such as GIMP or Adobe Photoshop. However, this is a lightweight player and viewer that has a different purpose.

It is fast, easy to use and it can handle many graphics file formats. It is small.

Additionally, you can download plug-ins and other skins from the official website. When you use IrfanView, you're limited only by your imagination. For example, did you know that you can create screensavers and slide shows? (all you need is IrfanView, install it and learn how to use it plus a small collection of images).

The best part after you created a screensaver or a slideshow is this: you can run them as stand-alone executables on other computers (Microsoft Windows) that don't have this program installed. I guess this says a lot about this free image viewer.

In the end, IrfanView is an excellent graphics viewer/editor. It reads an incredible number of file types, loads an array of external plug-ins and has a well-organized design. IrfanView's abundance of positives certainly outweighs its few negatives.

I guess my words won't be enough to describe this program at its real value. Many thanks to Irfan Skiljan for creating such useful graphics software. IrfanView is my favorite graphics viewer software for Windows. I used this gem for the first time back in 2001.