IrfanView

Description

Download IrfanView a fast, compact, small and free image viewer and converter that will work on almost all Microsoft® Windows® versions (including XP, Vista,7,8 and latest version 10).

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 (regularly updated).

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 extending 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 roles (you can draw arrows, lines or circles, etc.), toolbar skins, the slideshow is also present at this free and powerful graphics software.

Also, it has support for Adobe® Photoshop® Filters software, Batch conversion (with his 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.

Important: You can also download and use the IrfanView plug-ins from this page, available on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. They are listed below the 32-bit and 64-bit setup files. 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.

Trademark Note 1: Microsoft®, Windows®, and other product names are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Trademark Note 2: Adobe® and Photoshop® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and other countries. Please note that we are required by law to respect and follow the trademark guidelines, more info can be found here:

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. All in all, the total number of supported formats and extensions is 115 graphics file formats plus 17 video/audio file formats. 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® Vista, XP, 2008, 2003, 2000, 9x, NT ME, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10. The program can also run with Mac® OS X® Winebottler and Linux's Wine.

Support

Aside from providing support for over 130 file extensions, the software also offers multi-language support (22 total), 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 function to draw shapes on-screen. A full installation of IrfanView with all of its features and plug-ins takes up considerably less space (10MB) than a lot of competing image viewers. Thankfully, the software is easy to install. All one has to do is browse to a mirrored site, download the executable file, click the 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.

"When working with websites at scale, often I need to resize, convert, compress, rename or otherwise edit my images. While GIMP is an excellent open source tool for doing this individually, I've found its batch mode is clunkier than I'd hope. IrfanView on the other hand, is an absolute lifesaver. It's extremely light weight and has no trouble batch processing hundreds, or even thousands."

- Jase Rodley

It is fast, easy to use and it can handle many graphics file formats. It is small - his size at the time that I am writing this review is fewer than 2 MB in size.

Additionally, you can download plug-ins and other skins from the official website (see download links up). 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 executable on other computers (Microsoft Windows) that don't have this program installed. I guess this says a lot about this free image viewer.

The Bottom Line

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 it's few negatives.

I guess my words won't be enough to describe this program at his 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, and the program has over two decades (25 YEARS!) of development behind. If you appreciate the author devotion, spread the word or even better; if possible, please donate.

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