IrfanView version 4.10 showing a .png image with transparency. |
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| Developer(s) | Irfan Skiljan |
| Stable release | 4.32 / December 15, 2011 |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
| Available in | Multilingual (29) [1] |
| Type | Image viewer |
| License | Proprietary, Freeware (for non-commercial use) |
| Website | www.irfanview.com |
IrfanView ( /ˈɪərfænvjuː/) is a freeware/shareware image viewer for Microsoft Windows that can view, edit, and convert image files and play video/audio files. It is noted for its small size, speed, ease of use, and ability to handle a wide variety of graphic file formats, and has some image creation and painting capabilities. The software was first released in 1996. IrfanView is free for non-commercial use; commercial use requires paid registration.
The program is named for its creator, Irfan Škiljan from Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, living in Vienna.[2] IrfanView works under Windows 95 through Windows 7[3], and can also be run in Linux under Wine[4] and in Mac OS X using WineBottler.[5]
Contents |
The program is compact: the basic installation of version 4.30 occupies 1.6 MB, and a full install with all plugins occupies about 10 MB. The program can be downloaded directly to a U3 compatible device.
It supports viewing and saving of numerous file types including image formats such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, JP2 & JPM (JPEG2000), PNG (includes the optimizer PNGOUT), TIFF, camera RAW, ECW (Enhanced Compressed Wavelet), EMF (Enhanced Windows Metafile), FSH (EA Sports format), ICO (Windows icon), LDF (LuraDocument format), LWF (LuraWave format), PCX (Zsoft Paintbrush), PBM (Portable bitmap), PDF (Portable Document Format), PGM (Portable graymap), PPM (Portable Pixelmap), TGA (Truevision Targa), and viewing of media files such as Flash, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG, MP3, MIDI, and text files.[6][7]
While viewing images, there are several fit-to-screen scaling options and an automatic slideshow function. The viewer can open in sequence all the image-files and video clips (of most formats, including AVCHD) contained in a folder. Slideshows can contain still images and video clips; useful with current digital cameras.
IrfanView can create screensavers and slide shows from collections of images with optional accompanying MP3 audio. These can be saved as stand-alone executables which run on Windows computers without IrfanView installed.
For slideshow creation, screensaver creation and batch image translations, preset image processing steps can be applied to selected sets of images.
IrfanView can create icons by converting common graphic files into .ico format. It supports Adobe-compatible 8BF image processing filters, including many freely downloadable ones, primarily for application to whole images.
The program has TWAIN support for retrieving images from scanners, and extended support for taking screenshots.
Image editing includes crop, resize, and rotate. Images can be adjusted by modifying their brightness, contrast, tint, and gamma level[8] manually or automatically, and by converting them between file formats. Many of these changes can be applied to multiple images in one operation using batch processing. Resize can be applied towards the display of animated GIF images to make them larger in either windowed or full-screen modes. Lossless functions can be applied to JPG images in order to optimize the files without change to the displayed image.
IrfanView can direct the active image to open in an external graphics editor (Adobe Photoshop, for example) if it is installed.
In English by default, the program is internationalized in over twenty languages.
IrfanView uses plugins to handle a variety of image formats and to add optional functionality such as filter processing or other program features.[9] With the variety of format plugins, the program has been recommended for viewing obscure image formats, or corrupted files, which commercial photo editing software cannot read.[10][11]
This function displays thumbnail file previews, allowing picture organization and management, at sizes from 50 × 50 to 600 × 600 pixels. The user can select a number of thumbnails to perform Copy/Move/Delete operations on them, or send them to IrfanView's Batch Processing module or an external program such as Adobe Photoshop.
As of Version 3.92, installation of the eBay browser toolbar was included in order to support the developer. At that time, installing the toolbar was selected by default, which was criticized as spyware. In version 3.97, installation was unselected by default, and in 3.98, this was replaced by Google Desktop Search.[12] A no-toolbar version containing the program and its default plugins is available in a .ZIP archive rather than a .exe installer package.
Irfanview has been positively reviewed as "a longtime favorite"[12] and "really good" for easily and rapidly viewing and manipulating images, with its editing and drawing tools.[13] Other writers have focused on its ability to open a wide variety of image formats.[10][11] In a series of image quality tests conducted in 2004, compared with commercial image compressors and Adobe Photoshop 7, Irfanview 3.91 produced "consistently better images than the Adobe Photoshop JPEG encoder at the same data rate", and its JPEG2000 compression quality "closely followed" the best codec, JasPer."[14] According to IrfanView's official website, since 2003, IrfanView has been downloaded over 1 million times per month.
Irfan Škiljan graduated from the Vienna University of Technology. In a 2006 interview, 32-year-old Bosnian-born Škiljan said that he was able to more or less live off the software, generating income with the sale of licenses for commercial users and of special versions for different customers.[15]
According to Skiljan, the IrfanView logo and mascot is a "road cat" (there is a tire track across the smallest icon)[16] but that he "likes cats", and the icon is "a joke." The IrfanView website pictures him holding a cat.[2]