Irfan View or Infran View– Function Review of a Fantastic Free Image Viewer

I have been using Irfan View (or infran view if half the searchers on Google are to be believed) for about 10 years. As a teacher and I needed a low cost image processing solution. This was before Gordon Brown started pumping money into education. In the early 90s, we were suddenly faced with a flood of digital photography that needed to be sorted - pronto. It was irfanview free which rode to the rescue of impoverished schools.

It was coded by Irfan Skiljan, in the early 90s and it still receives regular updates and bug fixes, with Irfan himself, living from his earnings brought in by sales to business users of his irfan download. For home users, it remains free. Irfan View is a very compact programme which is able to work fast and has a simple user interface. There is an impressive range of file format support ; around 60 formats were visible in its list including multimedia files which can be supported through wide selection of plugins. The The irfan viewer is very good for quickly swapping images between formats.

Features:
Its core role is as a viewer, with the ability to quickly whizz through images in a folder, by using the obvious large back and forward arrows at top centre of the tool bar.

Another of the useful features is its ability to let you view and export stand-alone slide shows. These slide shows are very easily set up and are furnished with a very comprehensive dialogue for setting them up just the way you want them. There is an option for turning them into standalone .exe slide show packages.

There are items for generating contact sheets, and the HTML for simple photo gallery thumbnail pages.

Very quick image editing is possible on the whole picture, you can't select and work on a small area separate from the rest of the image.. This is ideal for quickly sorting images before you upload them to Facebook or Flickr.

You can also crop, flip and resize your images very easily from the image menu. There is also a canvas sizing tool which lets you grow the underlying background out around the main image to produce a border.

There are a variety of colour manipulation tools for basic colour correction which pop out of the image menu item and include the brightness and contrast tools. In addition to those slider tools, there is a set of effects like swap colors, increase/decrease colors and even palette and filter support which are quickly accessible via the image menu.

Additionally, the Auto Adjust Colours item seems to work much more effectively than in the past and dare I say it, it's probably at least as effective as the auto option in Photoshop. The final colour tool that needs mentioning is the histogram tool which gives a useful indicator of your colour balance but is not adjustable.

IrfanView can handle icons (.ico files). This makes it usable for creating a favicon-these are the funky little icons that appear in the browser address bar and favorites after bookmarking some sites. This ia achieved by resizing an image to 16 X 16 size, then decreasing the number of colours to 16 and saving it as a ".ico" file.

IrfanView is (allegedly!) the first graphic viewer that supports both animated gifs as well as the icon files: and for the technically minded, it is one of the first to support the multipage tif format. This gives users a quick way in, to producing their own favicons to make their websites instantly identifiable.

There are a range of special effects available, including: 3d button, blur, emboss, oil paint, edge detection, median, explosion, pixelize, sepia, rain drops. Newer versions of Irfan View are also able to integrate some of the third party filters that used to be the preserve of the Photoshop community. These give the kids endless hours of character assassination opportunities if you ever let them loose on a picture of yourself as a teacher!!

A set of free plugins, available alongside the normal irfan download, allows even more functionality with the addition of more file formats and features. As mentioned above the programme now supports third-party add ons like Filter Factory and the very effective 8bf plug-ins, originally developed for Photoshop.

A palette of simple painting tools has been introduced in recent versions. These are accessible from the edit menu. You can use them to add detail and emphasis to images. It is also a simple job to add text to your images now.

As well as quickly viewing images, you are able to browse thumbnails, print, sort and manage images; listen to audio, and watch a growing variety of video files; all without leaving the Irfan View window.

Batch processing is also available, so you can convert between file types, rename, scan, apply adjustments, add overlay text, and on batches of images in a single operation. This greatly increases your efficiency, if you have to do simple processing on large numbers of files

In Summary: Irfan View has a remarkable list of useful attributes, but you need to be aware that it is not and doesn't pretend to be a fully fledged image processor.

Pros
* IrfanView is free for non-commercial use but it is available to commercial users for a very reasonable fee.
* Very small code file so it works fast. very frugal in its use of your system resources.
* Can work with and converts between a wide variety of file formats.
* Selection of skins to tailor appearance to your liking.
* Huge range of plugins and filters are now available to extend functionality.
* Compatible with older Windows versions going back to Windows 95.

Cons
* Cannot work on a selected area.
* Not available to OSX or Linux users in native form.
* No layers for complex effects
* Some portions of the user interface look outdated.
* There is only one undo level.
* Other application installers are bundled are bundled with the irfan download package and require a manual opt out if you are not interested in them.

There is a tremendous variety of features squeezed into IrfanView's program file of just over a miniscule 1 MB. With Irfan View (or infran view ;-)), you could have processed 3 images by the time Photoshop has started up - and that's on the very powerful system I run. Good old Irfan reckons he's had over 55,000 appreciative emails since setting the project up. After the mileage I've had from his idea I'm not surprised and I am more than happy to do this little plug for his irfanview free project. If you follow the link back to my site I have the links to the latest version of the irfan download and the plugins.


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