IrfanView

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".

...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.

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.

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.

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.