Cool Tools: IrfanView is a Windows-only swiss army knife for images. It's lightning fast, opens just about any format known to man, and runs off a portable or network drive. Oh, and it's free as in beer. I've used IrfanView for more than a decade, and the developer has been cautious to add features but not interface bloat. It's never gotten slower. It gets really powerful when you start using shortcut keys.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
IrfanView
Cool Tools: IrfanView is a Windows-only swiss army knife for images. It's lightning fast, opens just about any format known to man, and runs off a portable or network drive. Oh, and it's free as in beer. I've used IrfanView for more than a decade, and the developer has been cautious to add features but not interface bloat. It's never gotten slower. It gets really powerful when you start using shortcut keys.
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5 comments:
This seems like a nice little tool for making minor adjustments to images quickly rather than opening up Photoshop or another bigger program when you're looking to make minor adjustments. It'd also be nice to have when you have to work on somebody else's computer, as it's small enough to stick on a thumb drive and take with you. Just sounds like a nice little program for when you're in a pinch or need to some quick image editing.
I wonder if there's a comparison between this and other freeware or open-source software programs and our world. At first I wanted to write how great a software program like this could be for those who can't afford or know how to use Photoshop but then I got to thinking, have programs like this one (free, easy to use, not meant to replace more efficient variants) always been around? I'm thinking about our CNC machine, other high tech gadgets, or tools designed to do a specific task. This all exist to do something, these kind of tools are the photoshops of carpentry. But in every hobby and professional shop you'll find homemade jigs or tools used to do projects they may not be intended for (nowadays they would call this "hacked.") Creative thinking like this doesn't make the high-tech options redundant but rather allows another convenience for the craftsmen.
Or maybe I'm way off.
I almost don't want to leave a comment of my own because Matt pretty much summed up everything I could say better than I could. But....
Just based on how long a program like Photoshop takes to load up is a good argument for having a quick program like this around. Especially for someone like me who is rarely doing anything that requires functions that Photoshop is really good at. Most of the time I'm cropping or fixing orientation or MAYBE trying to reduce red-eye, etc.
And I think people out in the great white information superhighway recognizing that others like themselves might have need of a program like this and offering it for so neglible a price really supports the positive ideas of what the Interwebs were designed for in the first place.
This seems like a great application but drawing on the CNC comparison it seems like there is a steep learning curve! Most personal projects I can do faster if just do them rather than figure out how to do them on the CNC machine. Now if I need to make 100 12' plywood circles I definitely would figure out the CNC machine real fast. And I have. I have yet to find a computer task that would merit we figuring out an open source solution. If I could get this program to write Greenpage responses. That would BE something.
I guess its great that windows has its only quick fix for images program now, but I feel like they're a little behind the ball on this as between preview and iPhoto I never open up photoshop for quick fixes. I find that MACs have had this software native for awhile now and this is just the case of software developers for Windows catching up. I am glad its free though. It would be unfortunate if MAC users had access to these types of programs for free and Windows users had to pay .
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