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IrfanView

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Freeware Graphic Viewer. This is one of the tools where I wonder how I could ever do without. In January 2003, a google search for "Irfanview" returned 100,000 results, in July of the same year more than 150,000. Basically, IrfanView is an image viewer, but it has an impressive number of editing features as well.

I had long been searching for an image viewer that would simply show me an image with as little ado as possible, in a window that is exactly the size of the image. With IrfanView, I finally found it. And soon I noticed that it had some astonishing editing capabilities too, astonishing because after all, it is a viewer and not an image manipulation program.

Some of IrfanViews main features are:

• View images in nearly every format.
• Convert images between all supported formats, simply by saving.
• Resize, flip, rotate, crop images, enhance or swap colors.
• Edit, export, and import palettes.
• Add text to images.
• Apply some effects like emboss, 3D button, oil painting, and more.
• Batch rename or batch convert image files, with the option to crop or resize them in the course of the latter.

I often call IrfanView "webmaster's best friend", since it can do all the image processing you need for the maintenance of an average website.

One of the things I especially love is that IrfanView detects file types by header, and by header only. Try the following:

1. Rename a GIF file to .jpg (or the other way round).
2. Open it in IrfanView.
3. Try the same with Photoshop.

Photoshop will abort with an error message. IrfanView will ask "This file is a GIF file with an incorrect extension. Rename it?" Even if you choose no, it will display it correctly. This can be especially great for viewing graphics of old games, which are sometimes common file formats, just with a different extension.

Furthermore, IrfanView does not care if there is anything appended to the image. I've used this to get images out of doc files. I just open them in a hex editor, search for the first known header (image file headers are easy to detect), crop everything before it and open the remaining file in IrfanView. If I then save it, I will have the image alone. Again, Photoshop aborts with an error if I do that.

• Homepage
• Milleneum's IrfanView Tutorial by Kevin Ruggles covers version 3.05.
• IrfanView, the Care and Feeding of by S.E.Clark was the first tutorial ever written for this program. It is originally from 1999, not updated any more, and only covers version 3.02. Should it ever be gone, there's a slightly older mirror on an Austrian server.
• IrfanView Shell Extension by BAxBEx Software is a freeware DLL that adds the ability to call some IrfanView functions from within the Windows Explorer.

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Last modified 2004-03-14