Image viewer programs are plenty in the market. A lot of people prefer an image viewer that not only has a lot of features but also loads up their images quickly. The latter is an important aspect as slow loading of images often kills the whole experience. IrfanView, on the other hand, promises to be much better at those aspects besides more. Let’s see what it offers the user.
Features and Performance
IrfanView supports almost every type of file format association. It doesn’t associate itself with every format though and leaves the choice to the user during installation. After you start IrfanView post-installation, you are greeted by a black viewing window that allows you to open and edit any picture you want. There is also a thumbnail view of the pictures available which makes for easier access of the pictures. The larger viewing window also adjusts to the picture that has been chosen in the thumbnail view.
Loading time of photos with IrfanView is incredibly low. To call it speedy is an understatement. It is almost instantaneous and it’s also quite open to addition of plug-ins related to music, video and some extra image plug-ins.
Earlier versions of IrfanView had a glitch with multi-monitor support. That seems to have been fixed now as images can be easily dragged to the secondary monitor and then displayed full screen. Earlier this full screen display was restricted only to the primary monitor.
Apart from the fast loading time and good thumbnail system, IrfanView also boasts of an impressive screen capture option. There are also many basic picture enhancement functions that allow you to play around with your pictures. The best thing about all this is that IrfanView is completely free. One gripe is the absence of a decent caching system. Developers should take note of this requirement as with a caching option all thumbnails can cached which allows for easier and quicker flipping through folders with a large collection of images. Inclusion of this feature (its already present in ACDSee) will pretty much push IrfanView to the top of image viewing programs for Windows.
There are a lot of other options as well which make the user experience that much better. IrfanView allows the user to save picture files as icon files which is not something you see with every image viewer and editor program out there. Apart from that, IrfanView has great loading speed, supports almost every format you could imagine, allows you to resize, convert, crop or format.
It also offers other effects like blur, edge detection, emboss, explosion, oil paint, pixelize and a lot more. The user also gets to decide the resolution and sharpening adjustments of the image.
Pros
It’s very fast, has loads of features and is a very small sized download. It’s also completely free for personal use. It supports picture, video and music plug-ins which makes it very versatile. Supports numerous image formats.
Cons
The GUI can do with some more polishing. The separate external image viewer is not to everyone’s liking and yes, thumbnail image caching needs to be incorporated.
This guest article is written by Sathishkumar who is the founder of the Internet Marketing company, Worthy Clique. When he is free, he also writes about iPhone 5 news and Virtual Tour Tips.
This post has been contributed by a guest poster. Their details, if any, appear at the end of the above article.
Twitter: shergillgames
says:
IrfanView has been my favorite Windows image viewer for years. It’s fast, loads large image files quickly, has a bunch of useful editing features, and it’s great scanning software too! I don’t need anything more complicated than that.
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Twitter: harpreet4564
says:
Irfanview is a good window image viewer.irfanview have lot’s of features and it can quickly open a large sized images .
Stablon’s recent post ..Nanothik Conditioner
This is my first time to see and read what irfanview is. I am so happy to see this because I was able to see something that is new when viewing images. Thanks for sharing this to us. I will really try if this will work for me.
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I had the same problem back in the day when I wanted to do the same exact thing. The solution is that you can’t edit your answer and add an image, but there is something else you can do. Instead of editing your answer, just “add clarification” to your answer and include an image in that response. This is what I did for many of my old questions if the image did not upload or if I forgot to upload it.
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IrfanView looks promising. I’ve always used the windows gallery viewer and it has never failed me. But it seems like IrfanView has a better editor system that my current picture viewer doesn’t offer so I think I’m giving it a shot.
I have been a really big fan of IrfanView for many years. I have tried others. As a matter of fact, I have about a half dozen free image programs on my computer as well as several online that I use, but I always go back to IrfanvView.
The reason I go to others is because IV does not have every single feature this person who wishes she had PhotoShop wants. I can find those features in other programs when I need them but, invariably, they tend to be heavier programs and not nearly so user-friendly as IV. So I keep using it for all my basic editing.
I especially love the watermarking tool and the bulk editing features.
Irfanview will load large image collections, (I have several folders with over 8,000 images), in under 30 seconds though the initial image will appear in a few hundred milliseconds. Irfanview uses RAM for its caching strategy and thus doesn’t litter your drive with thumbnail.db files like most programs. I have used this great program for about 10 years and on all levels of machine. It works quickly and allowing for the 24 bit nature of its image display dithering, it is quite accurate. The multitude of options available from within the program are quickly and logically accessed through the UI, a revamp here wouldn’t serve much purpose. If you feel that a change in the decorations or ‘chrome’ of the program UI is what you might like to see, I urge you to use it as is for at least several months. I am sure you will come to appreciate Skiljian’s hard work.
Great software, I’m using it.It’s easy to use,it’s fast and have excelent converter
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Twitter: AmandaBlogger
says:
I also use IrfanView, and I’m quite satisfied with it. It is of high quality and helps me to browse through images and pictures quickly, and without wasting my time
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I tend to use and like XnView over IrfanView. Even being a tech-oriented person, IrfanView seems to completely lacking in some capabilities or too difficult to find and operate certain tasks.
really its best apps for image and other gif images viewer like as short moview also run when i play a short film so its very good viewer also image editing.
thaks dude
devain richard’s recent post ..Dell Streak Pro D43 Full review and Specification
Wow, such an old software that I almost forget. Just recall this is a piece of great software that I used to very familiar during my college time (over 10 years ago). It also able to place avi if not mistaken.
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After reading this article and checking out the IrfanView website I have to say that I have thoroughly impressed with the quality of the image viewer. From my experience it is a fast software and doesn’t require heavy CPU
Twitter: Techx64
says:
Exactly irfanview is a very powerful photo viewing tool, but after all these years the developers dint work on its user interface, which will probably make it the best. For now i use ACDsee Pro, it gets the job done quickly and has a good UI.
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Twitter: technicallyeasy
says:
I used IrfanView years ago, but have since switched to other applications. The one thing I do miss about IrfanView was the speed at which it display images. So far, I haven’t found another program that can match it for the speed.
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