Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best image viewer in town, on Windows at least
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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).
Plus, there are Windows Store and portable versions which help to use it on otherwise locked-down company computers.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
Maccy on macOS is about half as good which is still an absolute unit of a tool. Couldn’t use a Mac without it.
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.
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.)
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?
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)
There was also a Microsoft Photo Editor that was bundled with Office 97: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor
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?
* 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.
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.