IrfanView is a compact, fast and friendly image viewer that allows multiple ways of viewing and even editing images directly. IrfanView is named for Irfan Skiljan, a very generous programmer from Bosnia. Irfan kept upgrading the program to expand the program’s features to make his users happy. Since I first discovered this software in January 1996, IrfanView has continued releasing from version 1.70 to 4.23.
It’s difficult to imagine that a programmer with so many arrays of features into an executable file is about only 1 MB.
Here are some but not all of the significant features below:
- It is free for private, education, charity and humanitarian organizations. If you intend to use for business, it is only 12 dollars to purchase.
- IrfanView is the first graphic viewer that supports both animated .gif and .ico (icons) and one of the first that supports the multipage .tif format.
- Full screen right-click browsing capability is my favorite feature which allows a user quickly cycle through all image files in a directory. I have not found a single other viewer that does this.
- Many basic editing functions are available like crop, rotate, flip, resize, and increase/decrease colors. Some professional effects like sharpen, swap colors, and even palette and filter support are also at your fingertips. This means that if you want to alter an image, you don’t have to run Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
- About 60 formats of images are supported by this software, including multimedia files supported through plugins.
- With this software, you can decrease the colors to 16 which can use to make favicon- the icon that appears in the browser address bar and favorites after bookmarking some sites.
If you think IrfanView is just an image editor, remember that it can do much more than you think. Even though you can use it to alter image, IrfanView is never going to replace a major paint program like Photoshop or even Gimp. Its speed, flexibility, ease of use and its compact size will not be beaten by those professional software.