I've been using IrfanView since at least 1997, if not earlier in 1996.
I still use IrfanView to this day. It's my Swiss knife for a lot of simple photo editing work (cropping, resizing, padding, text-adding, etc), batch-processing, and for browsing single photos through directories.
It's not just good, it's way faster than the bloated alternatives.
To top it off, IrfanView works beautifully on my Linux via Wine, and also on my Mac M1/M2 machines (and as a tool quicker than even Mac's own Preview). It's a primary install for me, whichever any platform I'm working on; and a software that's truly a gift to the world.
You want to open a picture, FAST, no matter the format or resolution ?
You want to open a picture and then move from one picture to the next in the same folder with arrow keys or mouse scroll, again fast and without loading or menus fonctions or whatever ?
You want to batch process a folder to convert all files to png with the larger side limited to 2000px, keep the location data but reset the orientation data, and remove the original file only if conversion succeeded ?
You want to scan something, rotate it and lossy pixelize an area ?
You want to resize, convert, re-encode a picture from one format to another with tonnes of option without resorting to command line because you're on windows and you would like to just do it in the same app you use for every photo thing ?
You want to cut a part of a picture, or identify the pixel color on a picture, or dozens or other every day operations like that ?
You want all of that to be absurdly fast, aka instant, without any complex menu or dozens of clicks to get where you need ?
I've been using irfanview since the beginning too, and it's not for lack of trying other stuff, it's just so much better. It's for me one of those tools, like Everything or Ditto or SumatraPDF or 7zip or NAPS2 or ... That just get what they are and what they should provide, and do just that, and do it right.
I use sumatra for how lightweight and fast it is. 7zip is just uncontested. I wish Ditto had copycats on linux and macos. It's just sublime.
I've never used irfanview though, I'm too quick to judge from the UI of an app xD
I see all those buttons on IrfanView and how it opens as an explorer of pictures rather than just a simple Photo Viewer with arrows to go back and forth and closed it. qView is my fav right now. It does exactly what I need from a viewer. It views. I rarely need editing.
Nowadays if I need editing I just open Photopea.
If I need batch editing/converting I open XnConvert.
tl;dr IfranView is probably amazing, but just like all those buttons on np++ I pre-judge and find simpler things
Do you have a link for Ditto? Searching for "Ditto app" and "Ditto software" returns several possible results for me (e.g. clipboard, music app, managing "copy", content sharing).
> You want to open a picture and then move from one picture to the next in the same folder with arrow keys or mouse scroll, again fast and without loading or menus fonctions or whatever ?
And moving to an adjacent folder is not much slower, because it includes a custom folder browser that allows quick navigation up and down the directory hierarchy using the arrow keys.
For MacOS, I wonder if it's faster than XNView MP. This was the fastest image viewer I could find for Apple Silicon. Also are you running it through Wine on MacOS or how do you get it working?
That’s a name I have not heard in a long while. I used to use it back on Windows 95 because it was a faster way to view JPEGs than opening Internet Explorer. Everything about that makes me feel old.
I opened the link first and I kept a few seconds trying to remember what we had to use to open JPEGs and GIFs back then. Then I read your comment. Right, IE for images. What a fun world we lived on!
Everybody was down with either IrfanView or ACDSee to look at their collection of uudecoded por--er, photographic human figure studies they got off USENET.
>I used to use it back on Windows 95 because it was a faster way to view JPEGs than opening Internet Explorer.
That's an amazing sentence. We should frame it and put it in a museum. Actually someone should make a book filled just with quotes like this, call it "Life Before the Gigahertz" or something.
I see so many comments these days bemoaning how slow modern software has gotten, but no one seems to remember/have been alive for the time when just rendering an image would take multiple seconds.
Just goes to show that our expectations scale with the available technology.
Like Delphi, FreePascal and Lazarus, though less often for those three than for IrfanView, and those three get a good number of sneers by modern ignoramuses, each time. The joke is on them, due to the amount of late night and weekend work (unpaid, often) that many of them have to pull, and tamely accept and try to justify, to save their egos and paychecks.
Back when i used Windows, IrfanView was my go-to image viewer, downloaded along with SumatraPDF via ninite.com. There's something similar in the repositories in Software Manager on Linux Mint, and Pix is fuller-featured, but like Foobar2000 for music, I still miss IrfanView from time to time, probably because of muscle memory and being more impressionable back then. (There's almostt certainly a way to get these Windows programs running on LMDE, I just don't care enough to mess with it.)
The Windows standard file open dialog allows you to paste a http(s) link in, which will be downloaded and opened from the Temp folder. This works with all applications that use that dialog.
I am often disappointed by the lack of shortcuts and features in VLC compared to Potplayer.
Just some of the few keyboard shortcuts in Potplayer I use regularly:
"<" and ">" to shift the subtitle sync by half a secondd
"shift-<" and "shift->" to adjust the audio sync by half a second
"[" and "]" to set an A-B repeat of that awesome scene or soundtrack
"D" and "F" to move by a single frame forward and backward
there's also shortcut to decrease and increase things like saturation and brightness by 1% or shortcuts for 0.5x, 1x, 2x size.
I have to make do with SMplayer in Linux which is awesome but you have to setup the keyboard shortcuts manually yourself.
It hits the sweet spot when it comes to clipboard functionality -- You can either copy the image itself, or copy its path on the filesystem. Most image viewers only support one of these commands.
IrfanView is one of my "must to have apps", going back to Win 98.
For simple image editing (resizing, cropping etc) and batch processing, it's though to beat.
Now I mostly work on macOS, and miss it. I guess XnView is close enough.
I love(d) infan view, but just got used to (a portable version of) Xnview. I keep going back to irfan, but again - as much as it is an amazing piece of software, Xn for me.
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I still use IrfanView to this day. It's my Swiss knife for a lot of simple photo editing work (cropping, resizing, padding, text-adding, etc), batch-processing, and for browsing single photos through directories.
It's not just good, it's way faster than the bloated alternatives.
To top it off, IrfanView works beautifully on my Linux via Wine, and also on my Mac M1/M2 machines (and as a tool quicker than even Mac's own Preview). It's a primary install for me, whichever any platform I'm working on; and a software that's truly a gift to the world.
You want to open a picture and then move from one picture to the next in the same folder with arrow keys or mouse scroll, again fast and without loading or menus fonctions or whatever ?
You want to batch process a folder to convert all files to png with the larger side limited to 2000px, keep the location data but reset the orientation data, and remove the original file only if conversion succeeded ?
You want to scan something, rotate it and lossy pixelize an area ?
You want to resize, convert, re-encode a picture from one format to another with tonnes of option without resorting to command line because you're on windows and you would like to just do it in the same app you use for every photo thing ?
You want to cut a part of a picture, or identify the pixel color on a picture, or dozens or other every day operations like that ?
You want all of that to be absurdly fast, aka instant, without any complex menu or dozens of clicks to get where you need ?
I've been using irfanview since the beginning too, and it's not for lack of trying other stuff, it's just so much better. It's for me one of those tools, like Everything or Ditto or SumatraPDF or 7zip or NAPS2 or ... That just get what they are and what they should provide, and do just that, and do it right.
I couldn't live without it at this point. It would be like cutting off both arms.
Treesheets Zim wiki Notepad++ Autohotkey
I've never used irfanview though, I'm too quick to judge from the UI of an app xD
I see all those buttons on IrfanView and how it opens as an explorer of pictures rather than just a simple Photo Viewer with arrows to go back and forth and closed it. qView is my fav right now. It does exactly what I need from a viewer. It views. I rarely need editing.
Nowadays if I need editing I just open Photopea.
If I need batch editing/converting I open XnConvert.
tl;dr IfranView is probably amazing, but just like all those buttons on np++ I pre-judge and find simpler things
And moving to an adjacent folder is not much slower, because it includes a custom folder browser that allows quick navigation up and down the directory hierarchy using the arrow keys.
Another shining endorsement of "modern" software development (no, check that... software "engineering")
Before I gave up Windows permanently, and that was over 20 years ago, I used this program.
The more things "change" the more they stay the same.
> (The dozen women should send me pictures of themselves in the nude ;-) (joke) )
https://web.archive.org/web/20090106143615/https://www.irfan...
Looks like it, too bad, this would be amazing to have on Linux.
https://blyt.net/phxslides/
https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/
I use Faststone, what am I missing?
That's an amazing sentence. We should frame it and put it in a museum. Actually someone should make a book filled just with quotes like this, call it "Life Before the Gigahertz" or something.
Just goes to show that our expectations scale with the available technology.
"The emperor has no clothes" kind of thing ...
And nowadays, layoffs, too ...
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Also I was under the impression just the DLLs for all the image formats would be over 4 MB. I wonder how large is it uncompressed.
This is the lightest fastest yet feature rich media player for windows I know. Its 12 MB compressed though. Didn't know irfanview could do that
Just some of the few keyboard shortcuts in Potplayer I use regularly:
"<" and ">" to shift the subtitle sync by half a secondd "shift-<" and "shift->" to adjust the audio sync by half a second "[" and "]" to set an A-B repeat of that awesome scene or soundtrack "D" and "F" to move by a single frame forward and backward there's also shortcut to decrease and increase things like saturation and brightness by 1% or shortcuts for 0.5x, 1x, 2x size.
I have to make do with SMplayer in Linux which is awesome but you have to setup the keyboard shortcuts manually yourself.
https://nomacs.org/
It hits the sweet spot when it comes to clipboard functionality -- You can either copy the image itself, or copy its path on the filesystem. Most image viewers only support one of these commands.
Now I mostly work on macOS, and miss it. I guess XnView is close enough.
Any windows PC I use doesn't feel right without the irfanview logo somewhere.