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?

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