IrfanView:Lightest Photo Viewing Software

Jul 6, 2010 by Shivendu Madhava

Developed by Irfan Skiljan—a student at the University of Vienna—in 1996, IrfanView has enjoyed some phenomenal success since then. One of the primary reasons is its ability to display virtually any type of file (including movie files) and do so in a light interface.

An installed copy of IrfanView is only 1.27 MB!The latest version also bundles with it a Thumbnail Viewer which, as is obvious, displays only thumbnails of your photos from a chosen folder.

It’s not just all viewing, though. Even the thumbnails package has some interesting options, including how you want to view the thumbnails, and whether you want to make any changes to the attributes of the photograph(s).Other interesting options in the Thumbnails package include copying and relocating files, creating slideshows, and even saving thumbnails as HTML files!

Moving along to the main Viewer: one of the major advantages of IrfanView is that you can lock a particular zoom position, and all photos that point forth (for that session) would be displayed at the same percentage. This has some advantages in the sense that you can flip through photos faster, and rendering photos doesn’t take as long, since the viewer knows exactly what zoom level to bring every photo to.

IrfanView is not just about viewing photos. It lets you do some minor editing as well. The options available are so widespread that it’s not possible to list them all here! But some of the more impressive ones are:

Slideshow, batch conversion, Acquiring from a TWAIN source, Batch acquire or scan, add text to photos, convert to greyscale, enhance colours, reduce red-eye, change colour palettes, and even capture screenshots. To be honest, this is just about 10 per cent of what it can do.

But the biggest advantage is the fact that IrfanView is the fastest viewer and can display almost all file types—forget all else!

Price:Free

Download:http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm