What Is Irfanview?

If you were wondering what is Irfanview, it is an all in one software application.




Irfanview is an image viewer and an editor, with many other useful features. It is free digital photo software.

As far as editing your photos, the typical edits are offered. Some of them are crop, rotate, resize, sharpen red eye reduction, saturation, brightness and contrast, and color hues.

If you want to view one of your folders in thumbnail view, Irfanview provides different options. Some of the options are sorting by name, size, date, extension, and portrait/landscape. I like being able to set the size of the thumbnails. If I want to see more of them on the screen, I set the thumbnails to be smaller. If I want to see more image detail, I set them to be larger.

Another great feature is all the file conversion options offered. You can open up any photo, and change it's file type. The most common ones are JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, and BMP. For example, you may have a photo, which is in the JPEG file format. Perhaps you want to save it as a TIFF so detail will not be lost as you edit and save it. Just do a Save As to a TIFF file. Or change it completely by just saving it as the new file extension.

There is also something called Batch Conversion. This is a great time saver. Basically, you select certain photos and perform a function for all images at one time. You can change the file extensions, rename them, resize, or even do edits. The only one I thought was less useful was editing. I like to see each picture as I edit. However, the other features are great.

So if you were wondering what is Irfanview and what else does it do....

Additional Irfanview Features

Create a slideshow

Create a panorama (I thought the software was weak in this area…I much prefer Autostich.

See my Panorama Pictures page.

Email photos

Print images

View EXIF data

Add additional free Irfanview plugins

One of the negatives with Irfanview, is that you can only Undo something once. So if you are editing, you can only undo the last edit.

I have used Irfanview for years. I do find it a little confusing to find everything. It could be organized in a better way. However, I find myself using it for certain features…..and it IS free. Go here for the Irfanview download:
Irfanview Download