IrfanView

Enter/return to go full screen (or exit from full screen?).

1. Windows 11 now ships with quite a decent and powerful image viewer/editor that covers most average users' use cases, therefore lowering the demand from people to go out of their way to find alternatives, like in the Windows XP days, which is a good thing (less likely to go download malware from the first Google result of "image viewer for Windows XP").

2. PC usage behavior has changed a lot since then. Many people don't even have PCs at home anymore, and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or on their phone or some external NAS that comes with it's own browser viewer app, instead of hoarding them all on their home PC hard drive, further lowering the need to seek out dedicated image viewers to manage giant offline collections of digital camera pics(I mean I still do, but I'm a minority nowadays).

These two factors combined meant the death of the third party PC image viewer app. Yeah, Irfan might be "the best", but the need for the best in this sector has declined significantly, and most users are now fine with "good enough".

Windows has shipped with an image previewer since Windows ME. You can see it in this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_ima...

Irfan for images and vlc for video is the name of the game for me (and total commander for file management, the efficiency compared to simpler stuff is still in wow territory).

Now I mostly work on macOS, and miss it. I guess XnView is close enough.

1: https://github.com/woelper/oculante

That's an amazing sentence. We should frame it and put it in a museum. Actually someone should make a book filled just with quotes like this, call it "Life Before the Gigahertz" or something.

Plus, there are Windows Store and portable versions which help to use it on otherwise locked-down company computers.

Also I was under the impression just the DLLs for all the image formats would be over 4 MB. I wonder how large is it uncompressed.

Someone remember other popular image viewers at the time?

If I had to go back it would def be one the first I installed.

I see no need for it for myself as even Windows has a default image viewer that is enough for me and I mainly use Linux anyway and every decent distro comes with a tool for that. Gnome and KDE both have their own that fit into the DE perfectly.

Democracy and economics.

>Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"?

It's not constantly, it's the answer to this question. Why are you getting your knickers in a twist?

In this case he gave the answer to the question of why Irfan view isn't popular anymore and the answer is because the majority of people have moved on.

It's not something he decided or that he can change, it's just the fact and he's reported it to you. The fact that you don't like the reality, is your own issue.

Does anyone know what programming language it is made with? I did a cursory search but cannot find any information. Just curious.

Just goes to show that our expectations scale with the available technology.

Thank you very much.

From myself (1995-...) and my father (1995-2003).

...until Google closes their account or their data becomes otherwise inaccessible!

It horrifies me that so many people are so willing to commit their valuable data to the cloud just because of convenience.

Leaving aside Big Tech's spying on users and selling away their privacy, users who commit data to the cloud put its integrity and ultimately its long-term survival in the hands of third parties who couldn't give a damn whether it was lost or destroyed—their only interest is the income it generates.

That the shift to the cloud has been so complete is very disconcerting. It never ceases to amaze me that so many are so trusting of others that they'd actually hand over their valuable data for safekeeping to the likes of Google, et al. I've used the internet since before the inception of the Web and I've never once committed any of my data to the cloud (but if I had to then it'd be an encrypted backup).

Re IrfanView, I used to use Ed Hamrick's rather excellent image viewer VuePrint until I came across IrfanView about two decades ago. For numerous reasons IrfanView is the best viewer out there.

I still use IrfanView to this day. It's my Swiss knife for a lot of simple photo editing work (cropping, resizing, padding, text-adding, etc), batch-processing, and for browsing single photos through directories.

It's not just good, it's way faster than the bloated alternatives.

To top it off, IrfanView works beautifully on my Linux via Wine, and also on my Mac M1/M2 machines (and as a tool quicker than even Mac's own Preview). It's a primary install for me, whichever any platform I'm working on; and a software that's truly a gift to the world.

IrfanView and foobar2000 (mp3 player) haven't left my side since I started using them. Ditto (clipboard manager) has also earned its place.

And yes, at times it flickers and or images can tear.

IrfanView likely still supports more formats, since it was earlier than any other tool. This means any edge cases in file encoding that might not work, or render ideally likely has been solved there first.

It probably has some batch file conversion tricks in it too.

IrfanView also provided for free for a lot of years what was hard to get without paying. If it existed on mac I'd be all over it.

Ah, the windows viewer always wasn't that good.

And if I remember the big first improvement of it was copying a lot of IrfanView.

Since this post, I remembered another old friend that was excellent on windows, AcdSEE. Also worth looking into.

Any windows PC I use doesn't feel right without the irfanview logo somewhere.

Wish there was a mac version, but it can be run in an emulator easy enough.

'Most people' = LCD/lowest common denominator.

If one doesn't mind grovelling around at the bottom then that's fine.

Edit: typo (thanks)

And by the way, you don’t actually know the probability of a random person losing access to a Google account vs losing physical mediums, let alone how many of those cases were cases where their only photos were stored there. It’s obviously different from person to person, and maybe you can estimate that one is safer than the other in individual cases, but you can’t extrapolate that and say it applies in every person’s case. But the GP was referring to cases where it was implied the only copy was stored on the cloud.

Needless to say, I have zero fond memories of this program. Maybe these were nuances of our particular setup (many other such cases at that firm, sadly), but…eh, whatever. There’s better out there.

https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/

You want to open a picture and then move from one picture to the next in the same folder with arrow keys or mouse scroll, again fast and without loading or menus fonctions or whatever ?

You want to batch process a folder to convert all files to png with the larger side limited to 2000px, keep the location data but reset the orientation data, and remove the original file only if conversion succeeded ?

You want to scan something, rotate it and lossy pixelize an area ?

You want to resize, convert, re-encode a picture from one format to another with tonnes of option without resorting to command line because you're on windows and you would like to just do it in the same app you use for every photo thing ?

You want to cut a part of a picture, or identify the pixel color on a picture, or dozens or other every day operations like that ?

You want all of that to be absurdly fast, aka instant, without any complex menu or dozens of clicks to get where you need ?

I've been using irfanview since the beginning too, and it's not for lack of trying other stuff, it's just so much better. It's for me one of those tools, like Everything or Ditto or SumatraPDF or 7zip or NAPS2 or ... That just get what they are and what they should provide, and do just that, and do it right.

Another feature I use often ist to copy the current image to a preset location. I use that for quickly pre-sorting photos.

I used to get horrified too until I learned that average user doesn't care much about losing pictures. My wife has lost phone full of pics multiple times and she's upset for like few hours.

> Who cares what 'most people do'?

Someone trying to understand why _most_ comments reflect a certain behaviour is, by definition, someone who cares about understanding what "what most people do".

It's easy to obsess over the idea of any data loss, because the value of some data is quite high. But for most people in most circumstances losing their cloud hosted photos is probably not a big deal, and it's also probably far less likely than the users losing locally stored photos due to some mistake of their own.

https://nomacs.org/

It hits the sweet spot when it comes to clipboard functionality -- You can either copy the image itself, or copy its path on the filesystem. Most image viewers only support one of these commands.

This way I can install almost everything I want with one command.

I'll post my list tomorrow when I'm back on my PC.

Maccy on macOS is about half as good which is still an absolute unit of a tool. Couldn’t use a Mac without it.

So yeah, it’s C++ but that doesn’t necessarily tell you much, it could still very well be basically C.

Another shining endorsement of "modern" software development (no, check that... software "engineering")

Before I gave up Windows permanently, and that was over 20 years ago, I used this program.

The more things "change" the more they stay the same.

I mean why would I? If all I need is viewing a couple of photos every now and then, cropping and rotating one or two and drawing some circles on them to highlight something in a screenshot and Windows already does that then why bother with Irfan other than habit and nostalgia.

Now windows has gotten a lot better, with the [WIN][Shift][s] shortcut (so cropping no longer is necessary). But that still misses a feature to quickly draw an arrow.

Irfanview has that. Screenshot, crop, F12, put an arrow to point at something, copy, paste into Teams.

So fast...

I go back through photos and videos of my kids and it reminds me that I succeeded at something worthwhile and difficult for at least a period of my life. They had a blessed childhood.

Food or selfies and even holiday snaps mean little. But the kids... that's the raison d'être.

Overall it's these photos and videos that are my strongest motivation for the paranoia-level backup setup I have.

We are now in an age where expected norms in society are such that the slightest criticism of anyone—even if justified—is taken as offensive by both the recipient and by onlookers.

Unfortunately, keeping mum and not saying anything just lets people off the hook, they no longer have to justify their actions either to themselves or anyone else. In fact, I'd argue that in recent years the trend has gotten so bad and out of hand that it's having a very noticeable negative impact on society.

Clearly, I'm older than you, when I was younger this comment would have hardly raised an eyebrow (right, I'm old enough to have noticed this societal change and the negative impact it's had).

When I was at school we were actively taught to ignore unwarranted critism, and even if it were justified to consider carefully what was actually said before responding. In fact, the old adage that 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' was drummed into us kids at a very early age (in infants school). Can you imagin teachers teaching that today? I'd reckon they'd likely be lynched.

Now, what's the situation nowadays when kids are no longer taught how to develop and strengthen their resilience? Well, one only has to look at the fallout on social media. Now we have kids taking such great offense at something someone has said to them and they're getting upset to such an extent that some even resort to suicide. (When I was a kid suicide was something that only adults with disturbed minds did—never kids or teenagers, it was unheard of. No doubt there were isolated instances but we kids never heard of them.)

And Irfanview could do those things in it's sleep with both hands tied, with a few simple config changes. But the dysfunction - often rooted in the minimal, grudging acknowledgement given to IT by (non-IT) old professions - led to a lot of half-assed setups where staff butted their heads against obstacles that were often a mere few clicks away from improvement, if only they'd known to put their attention there. But of course, they were too busy being civil engineers.

And if I may shoehorn another point in here : it's not as though AutoCAD and other such industry software comes with ready default settings. If you used those straight out of the box with no customisation for your own situation, you'd be in deep trouble.

7zip (open any archive)

VLC (open any audio/video file)

IrfanView (+ the "all plugins" installer on the same page, open any picture file)

SumatraPDF (read PDFs)

Libreoffice (to open any office files)

NAPS2 (easy scan, and split/merge/... PDFs)

Ditto (give your clipboard a memory)

Everything (an instant file search that works)

TeraCopy (replace windows copy with queue, queues, add files to the queue instead of starting a second parallel copy, pause that works, ...)

Powertoys (so many to list ... mass rename file easily, screen ruler, text extractor ...)

If it's appropriate : Qbittorent (clean torrent client)

Nvidia graphic card ? NVCleaninstall, so you can install just the clean driver you need

Windows 10 or 11 ? O&O Shut Up (to disable all the telemetry and onedrive in one click, there are plenty alternatives but I sort of like this one)

Windows 11 ? ExplorerPatcher to remove suggestions in the start menu and the new and terrible castrated contextual menu

And of course your browser of choice and extensions

In ten minutes you have a computer that feels much more smart and usable. There are plenty of great software out there, but I feel like many what to install lists are very topical or include software you won't use in many cases or once every 6 months, so this is my short list of what you will use essentially every time you use the computer.

"The emperor has no clothes" kind of thing ...

And nowadays, layoffs, too ...

The app is incredibly good. It does everything you could want, it's less than 10MB, blazing fast and easy to use. Super configurable. I used to have to fight with IT to have it installed or find a way to run some portable version just to have it at work.

I can't speak for others, but I think if you had spent a little bit more time trying to figure out the solution to the issues you identify, you would have found the answer, but somehow you are instead blaming the dev, which is what IMHO warrants downvotes.

    ; open / view current clipboard in irfanView
    ; win alt i
    #!i::run,path\to\IrfanView\i_view32.exe /clippaste

I suppose the key difference is that some people want just a read-only image viewer that traverses a directory, while others want a photo viewer, or image metadata editor, or photo management system. I haven't used Windows' default image viewer in ages, but I recall when I used it, rotating an image actually rotated the image, as in it changed the orientation header of JPEG files and rewrote the files. This is why I have trust issues. If even image viewers can't just view the image, how can I possibly trust the software that drives cars, flies planes, or does the banking?

WHAT? IN 4 MB??? WHAT???

That's amazing!

These are both small and fast image viewers, specially noticeable on very large images.

We need a list/directory of fast tools like these, specially now when every tool is bloated by default.

Looks like it, too bad, this would be amazing to have on Linux.

One of the best parts about ditto is that you can choose to paste with or without formatting

What are you talking about? Make a rectangular selection on the image (click and drag across the image), then CTRL+Y. Couldn't be easier.

I've never used irfanview though, I'm too quick to judge from the UI of an app xD

I see all those buttons on IrfanView and how it opens as an explorer of pictures rather than just a simple Photo Viewer with arrows to go back and forth and closed it. qView is my fav right now. It does exactly what I need from a viewer. It views. I rarely need editing.

Nowadays if I need editing I just open Photopea.

If I need batch editing/converting I open XnConvert.

tl;dr IfranView is probably amazing, but just like all those buttons on np++ I pre-judge and find simpler things

https://maccy.app

https://tapbots.com/pastebot/

https://www.alfredapp.com

MPC-BE for video/audio

XnViewMP

Firefox for PDFs

MS office web (no need to install anything)

Windows 10+ includes clipboard history

PowerToys does have a file search, not sure how it compares to Everything

Doesn't work super well with multimonitor and should just ignore non-image files though imho

Modern operating systems and especially web dev have made entire generations forget how powerful computers and software are / can be.

> The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used.[4][5][6][7] The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables[a] or slab, before the term byte became common.

> The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte, as 2 to the power of 8 is 256.[8] The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte.[9] Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Buchholz_1956_1...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_ref-Buchholz_1956_1_...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Rao_1989-6

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Tafel_1971-7

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-ISO_IEC_2382-1_...

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-CHM_1964-10

CTRL-P pastes anything (image, text; not sure what else) in clipboard to a file in current directory

Just some of the few keyboard shortcuts in Potplayer I use regularly:

"<" and ">" to shift the subtitle sync by half a secondd "shift-<" and "shift->" to adjust the audio sync by half a second "[" and "]" to set an A-B repeat of that awesome scene or soundtrack "D" and "F" to move by a single frame forward and backward there's also shortcut to decrease and increase things like saturation and brightness by 1% or shortcuts for 0.5x, 1x, 2x size.

I have to make do with SMplayer in Linux which is awesome but you have to setup the keyboard shortcuts manually yourself.

"To top it off, IrfanView works beautifully on my Linux via Wine, and also on my Mac M1/M2 machines (and as a tool quicker than even Mac's own Preview). It's a primary install for me, whichever any platform I'm working on; and a software that's truly a gift to the world."

TreeSize (to easily find out what is consuming disk space)

picpick/ shareX (screenshotting with annotationsand autosave)

pdftk (pdf merge, split, crop, interleave(

ffmpeg (video trim, split, re-encode, etc.)

Lossless cut (GUI for ffmpeg trim and extract/add tracks)

OpenShot video editor (when DaVinci Resolve is too much for the job and you need simple edits and effects)

OBS Studio (screen record, stream to youtube)

https://gist.github.com/Christoph-Wagner/c26ee84105edd12b4d3...

Not really the difference in context of IrfanView which is also just an image viewer.

I tried JpegView, but it’s lacking several features I use in IV, and stuff I commonly do in IV is harder to do, so for me IV is a clear and easy winner. Performance is a little better, but not in a way I’d actually care about (mainly superfast skipping through images is slightly faster)

I use Faststone, what am I missing?

Phoenix Slides

https://blyt.net/phxslides/

It replaced the (abandoneware) Xee3 on my system.

https://blyt.net/phxslides/

I reinstalled IrfanView from sheer nostalgia, and while it's still a good program, it doesn't handle pinch/zoom gestures as well as the default app. Same for editing, where IV has more features, yet core stuff like handwriting smoothing isn't as good.

The biggest difference between "these days" and now is IMHO the wide availability of other tools to do more advanced stuff. For instance I remember batch processing features and export features in IV that I used a lot, but nowadays I'd do it in Imagemagick or GIMP.

There is less need for a swiss army knife when the specialized tools are right there any time you need them.

I couldn't live without it at this point. It would be like cutting off both arms.

Btw I use a Mac nowadays and I get strong ACDsee vibes from open-source Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/ with browsing through images with the mouse-wheel ;)

For SSH I was a die hard team PuTTy for a long time but these days one of the first thing I install on my windows computer is WSL and a Debian inside, that covers all my SSH needs.

Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/

open-source, ignore the simple web page, software is awesome.

FSViewer link: https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm XYPlorer link: https://www.xyplorer.com/

https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook

https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/

There was also a Microsoft Photo Editor that was bundled with Office 97: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor

Treesheets Zim wiki Notepad++ Autohotkey

This is the lightest fastest yet feature rich media player for windows I know. Its 12 MB compressed though. Didn't know irfanview could do that

There's also a small church, underground, which was carved from solid rock rather than built. It's amazing.

https://visitbih.ba/en/catacombs-the-mystical-site-built-600...

wasd for games, ctrl+shift+qewasd for play/pause/forward/backward/next/prev and so on. Don't need to switch window, don't need to move hand away from wasd. Can't live without it now even though I don't have so much playtime any more. Works just as well in any other environment.

FastStone Image Viewer is the performant, slick image viewer I use now.

IrfanView has some rough defaults like if you scroll to the end of a folder, a window pops up that you have to click away before you can scroll back. I use it all the time for simple editing, not viewing.

> (The dozen women should send me pictures of themselves in the nude ;-) (joke) )

https://web.archive.org/web/20090106143615/https://www.irfan...

But it is highly configurable, and I think you're catching grief because it really doesn't sound like you or your colleagues made any attempt to take advantage of that.

https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc

it can be found here, and a few other places as well, but unfortunately the source code was never shared. Though it was such an amazing, blazing fast and bloatfree app, such a shame the code was never shared, and now it seems lost, unless the author is around somewhere?

Literally everyone else in this thread said the exact same thing, they do not use it anymore because nobody needs it anymore.

Speaking of out of sync: Enjoy your self-satisfaction in using some ugly ass looking outdated software that has 100 functions you do not use.

nurettin replied, sibling comment.

But it's not difficult to write your own for simple map types at least, like with strings as the keys. Generic maps would be harder.

Even works as a portable app.

https://getwacup.com/

WinDirStat (which used to be my goto) took over 6 minutes and ate 625mb of ram.

TreeSize Free took over 30 seconds, I'm not sure how much ram as it doesn't report it. It also kept trying to upsell me.

WizTree took less than 8 seconds. What's wrong with it?

edit: 2tb nvme ssd, mostly full of rubbish, windows 10.

>VLC (open any audio/video file)

SMPlayer using mpv on the backend

Allows to grep inside XLSX and Word files.

http://dngrep.github.io/

* Settings in one place, that way I could have probably easily found out how to remove the annoying zoom-features.

* Batch conversion

* Slideshow: Add files/folders, not just a textfile or folder

* Slideshow: More options in general, e.g. random or unique random.

https://imageglass.org

https://nomacs.org/

I do think it's odd to expect an image viewer to be able to do batch conversion, though. That's what I meant by a read-only image viewer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

And moving to an adjacent folder is not much slower, because it includes a custom folder browser that allows quick navigation up and down the directory hierarchy using the arrow keys.

… and lossless cropping, too.

Long gone are the days where people would come to me asking if i could open some file, so the other uses i had for graphicconverter are gone too.

  1. Sublime Text & VIM (for all things text)
  2. Firefox with tampermonkey & ublock origin (browsing 101)

  3. Everything (Uses it as my launcher and finder of everything on my computer)
  4. Irfanview (must-have for everything image-related)
  5. Classic Shell/Explorer (to get a usable winXP-like desktop)
  6. Gamma Panel (Adjust brightness via keyboard shortcut presets)
  7. O&O Shut Up (for same reason as you)
  8. Autoruns (to disable all useless services & scheduled crap-ware in windows)
  9. MSys (for linuxy everyday tools, can't work without 'em).
  10. Conda (with opencv, torch ... for automation and graphics munging)
  11. Winamp (For all things music consumption)
  12. VirtualDub ("Irfanview" for Video)
  13. MediaPlayer Home Cinema + ffdshow & LAV filters/splitter (Better VLC)
  14. Avisynth (All things video processing)

  3. Irfanview (must-have for everything image-related)
  4. Conda (for heavier automation than bash)
  5. Wine + (Irfanview, Virtualdub, Avisynth)

  3. iTerm (for a usable terminal)
  4  Homebrew (to get linux tools so I can work)
  5. iStat Menu (to know what the heck my laptop is doing)
  6. Conda (for automation)

(Haven't found a wine-variant for MacOS, so I have to make do with the shtty preview instead of irfanview. For Video stuff I'm forced to use Linux or Windows for via remote desktop).

I wish there was cross-platform install bundle that contained:

  * Irfanview, Everything, Avisynth, Virtualdub, MPCHC with LAV filters

If someone aims to create such, that'd be awesome :)

Now it's just what I use, I know it works and my files are safe.