Free image viewer is a winner

How many times has someone sent you a graphics file in a format you cannot open? While the common GIF and JPG can be viewed by anyone with popular tools such as web browsers and e-mail software, there are dozens or even hundreds of less common formats.

One of my clients, an importer, would routinely receive image files from all over the world in file formats they’d never heard of and could not open. A friend of mine used an obscure photo editor and would send me photos in the software’s proprietary format, unopenable by my photo software. The solution to both issues was the same: IrfanView.

IrfanView  is a shareware image viewer that is free for non-commercial use. It is the creation of a European programmer whose first name is Irfan.

Running on Windows, IrfanView will open virtually any image format, as well as many audio and video formats. While the basic installation handles a multitude of file formats, you may also install the extra plugins pack, to support even more image, sound and video formats. During installation you may choose to make IrfanView the default viewer for all those file formats, or just for the formats you select.

IrfanView is, simply, amazing. I have yet to receive an image file format that it cannot open. It has also enabled me to listen to sound files and view video files that my more feature-rich tools would not recognize. IrfanView’s other great benefit is its speed. It launches quickly and loads image files quickly. In the time it takes for me to wait for my commercial photo editor to open, I can already have doubled-clicked the file and viewed it in IrfanView.

IrfanView also includes basic editing tools such as cropping, resizing, rotating, and others including the ability to create self-running slide shows. Many years ago when I was beginning to create web sites, I used IrfanView for editing and optimizing all my web photos and graphics.
 
I install IrfanView on all my computers, and on computer I work on of friends, family and clients. Many of my user don’t even know the name of the software. They just know that when they double-click on an image file of any format, it opens. IrfanView is simple, lightweight and highly useful software. The fact that it’s free for home use is just a bonus.