IrfanView: Free Graphics Muscle, and Don't Forget the Plug-Ins
Do you frequently work with graphics on the web? I’ve written before about my main tool for working with them: IrfanView. IrfanView is much faster to load than a full-featured product such as Photoshop, and is great in many other ways for on-the-fly graphics tasks such as customizing screenshots or putting together slideshows. The application is also free, and has an insanely loyal user base.
For the past year or so, the number of plug-ins available for IrfanView has steadily increased. At the same time, though, an informal poll I’ve done of other people I know who swear by this application shows that they don’t use the plug-ins. That’s as much of a mistake as not using extensions with Firefox.
When you install IrfanView, you get a small handful of plug-ins automatically installed, including Effects, Icons, Slideshow and Video plug-ins. However, through the Plug-Ins link on the left side of IrfanView’s home page you can get access to tons more useful plug-ins.
If you already use IrfanView or if you’ve just installed it, the best way to get to know which plug-ins may work best for you is to download the entire set of them as one large executable. You can also download subsets of them arranged by category, including Formats, Effects, and Multimedia.
In the Effects category, for example, plug-ins can give you access to far more filters than a standard installation of IrfanView has. One advantage of a huge product like Photoshop, compared to IrfanView, is that it offers a giant set of filters, but the plug-ins for IrfanView provide almost everything you need for common graphics tasks. This is one of the best freeware applications of any kind in my experience.
Do you use IrfanView or another useful graphics application?
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Best thing about Irfanview: Its batch processing is WAY better/faster/more intuitive than Photoshop’s.
If you just want to resize a batch (something I do constantly) Irfanview is your best friend.
I’ve been using this quick little app for years now. It’s light, easy and reliable. I’ve never found anything that matches it, though there are plenty of programs with the same functionality. I’ve given this to many of my clients who had to upload images to their sites but couldn’t afford Photoshop or the other more expensive image editing suites. This gave them a quick, easy tool to resize/crop images for their site.
Hang a big hell-yeah on that.
At a BARE minimum IrfanView makes a spiffy tool for previews (incuding PSD’s) and batch resampling, at a resource cost considerably less than that of Photoshop.
Now all they need to do is port it to the Mac.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE this tool LOVE it. LOVE it.
I think that sums it up.
I use IrfanView as well – it’s great. One thing I’d like to find a plugin for is to be able to draw arrows and place text in an image.
Does anyone know of a plugin for irfanview that allows this?
I was a devoted irfanview user for years, until I discovered Faststone Capture this year, which for a website writer has some fabulous features. It costs 20 bucks but saves me that much every day in speed and effectiveness.
Dave: IrfanView has basic paint support in the standard package. Just press F12 and you can draw lines, boxes and arrows to your heart’s content.
The only drawback is that the drawings are raster-based, so you have to do them correctly in one go (CTRL-Z does work, though)
Irfanview keeps my system clean because of the stand_alone executable file nature. No viruses.