IrfanView

I've been using IrfanView since at least 1997, if not earlier in 1996.

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.

You want to open a picture, FAST, no matter the format or resolution ?

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.

Do you have a link for Ditto? Searching for "Ditto app" and "Ditto software" returns several possible results for me (e.g. clipboard, music app, managing "copy", content sharing).

The most famous is the clipboard one (https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/). I'd be surprised if they were referring to another "Ditto" software.

You are correct, this is the one I meant. It claims to handle windows clipboard "shortcomings" by remember previous entries and allowing you to access it easily (allowing for multi copy paste situation), and it does just that and do it well.

BTW windows now ship with a clipboard tool like this using Windows + V shortcut. I use other tools you mentioned already though. Need to try ditto. Is there a list of similarly *fast* alternatives like this for windows (+other OSes)?

Idk if this is still the case but back when I tried the built in clipboard history when it was first released, it didn’t handle formatted text well, nor did it handle multi-media particularly well, if at all.

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