IrfanView

IrfanView

IrfanView version 4.33 showing a photo
Developer(s) Irfan Skiljan
Initial release 1 June 1996[1]
Stable release 4.38[2] / 23 June 2014
Development status Active
Operating system Microsoft Windows
Size 1.81 MB (IrfanView)
10.24 MB (Plugins)[3]
Available in English, German (included)
Other languages available as download.[4]
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 after its creator, Irfan Skiljan, from Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, living in Vienna.[5] IrfanView works under all versions of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows 8,[6] and can also be run in Linux under Wine[7] and in Mac OS X using WineBottler.[8]

Features

The program is compact: the basic installation of version 4.30 occupies 1.6 MB, and a full install with all plugins (not required for basic functionality) 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), PCX (Zsoft Paintbrush), PBM (Portable bitmap), PDF (Portable Document Format), PGM (Portable graymap), PPM (Portable Pixelmap), TGA (Truevision Targa), WebP and viewing of media files such as Flash, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG, MP3, MIDI, and text files.[9][10]

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[11] 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.

The program has been internationalized in over twenty languages; English is the default.

Plugins

IrfanView uses plugins to handle a variety of additional image, video, and sound formats and to add optional functionality such as filter processing or other program features.[12] 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.[13][14]

Thumbnails

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.

Search engine toolbar

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. A no-toolbar version containing the program and its default plugins is available in a .ZIP archive rather than a .exe installer package.

Reception

Irfanview has been positively reviewed as "really good" for easily and rapidly viewing and manipulating images, with its editing and drawing tools.[15] Other writers have focused on its ability to open a wide variety of image formats.[13][14] 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."[16] According to IrfanView's official website, since 2003, IrfanView has been downloaded over 1 million times per month.

Author

Irfan Skiljan graduated from the Vienna University of Technology. In a 2006 interview, 32-year-old Bosnian-born Skiljan 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.[17]

Logo/mascot

According to Skiljan, the IrfanView logo and mascot is a "road cat" (there is a tire track across the smallest icon)[18] but that he "likes cats", and the icon is "a joke" - the IrfanView website pictures him holding a white domestic cat.[5]

See also

References

  1. ↑ History of changes for older versions of IrfanView
  2. ↑ History of changes for the current version of IrfanView
  3. ↑ IrfanView PlugIns
  4. ↑ Additional languages for IrfanView
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Skiljan, Irfan. "About the author". Irfanview.com. Retrieved 2007-10-30.
  6. ↑ "Windows 8 Compatibility for Irfanview by Irfan Skiljan: Compatible". Windows Compatibility Center. Microsoft. Retrieved 2013-04-21.
  7. ↑ "IrfanView 3.x, 4.x (test results)". WineHQ.org. Retrieved 2011-05-14.
  8. ↑ "Irfanview for Mac: Apple Support Communities". Retrieved 2011-05-26.
  9. ↑ "List of supported formats". Irfanview.com. Retrieved 2010-07-12.
  10. ↑ Harris, Andy (2010). HTML, XHTML, and CSS All-in-One For Dummies (2nd ed.). For Dummies. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-470-53755-8. Retrieved 2011-09-09.
  11. ↑ Crowder, David A. (2007). Google Earth for Dummies. For Dummies (Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing). pp. 289–290. ISBN 978-0-470-09528-7. Retrieved 2010-06-23.
  12. ↑ Available Plugins Irfanview.com. Retrieved 2010-07-12.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Brundage, Barbara (2009). Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media / Pogue Press. p. 73. Retrieved 2010-06-23.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Nelson, Sharon D., Esq; Simek, John W. and Maschke, Michael (2009). The 2009 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide. American Bar Association. p. 104. ISBN 978-1-60442-321-1.
  15. ↑ Harris, Andy; McCulloh, Chris (2008). HTML, XHTML, and CSS All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies. Wiley Publishing. p. 97. ISBN 978-0-470-18627-5. Retrieved 2010-06-23. Features extensive introduction and opinion.
  16. ↑ Ebrahimi, Farzad; Chamik, Matthieu; Winkler, Stefan (November 2004). "JPEG vs. JPEG2000: An Objective Comparison of Image Encoding Quality". In Tescher, Andrew G. Applications of Digital Image Processing XXVII. Proceedings of the SPIE 5558. pp. 300–308. doi:10.1117/12.564835. CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.65.5495.
  17. ↑ Hosbach, Wolf (2006). "Hat es sich gelohnt?" (in German) (6). PC Magazin. Retrieved 2008-10-28. (English tr.)
  18. ↑ "IrfanView Frequently Asked Questions". Irfanview.com. Retrieved 2007-10-30.

External links