Irfan View 3.61

By Disk Librarian Mike Kato

Irfan View is a phenomenal graphics viewer for any version of Windows, cretaed by Irfan Skiljan from Jajce, Bosnia, and distributed as freeware.

Originally published in 1996, the current version, 3.61, is 797.5 Kbytes for the full installable executable. The file is also available in a zip format, which is slightly smaller. In addition, there are a number of plug-ins for Irfan View, which enable the application to open RealVideo, Macromedia Flash, Windows Media, and other multimedia intensive file formats. Unlike many other freeware utilities, there are no DLLs, no obnoxious nag screens, and no banner ads. It is totally free for home users, and commercial users need only pay $10 for a single-user license.

Irfan View can be downloaded from many locations, but some major ones are provided here:

http://cws.internet.com/image-irfan.html
http://irfanview.tuwien.ac.at/
http://www.ryansimmons.com/users/irfanview/
http://www.winplanet.com/winplanet/reviews/1217/1/
http://tucows.planetmirror.com/mmedia/preview/194967.html

A list of the file types supported is provided here:

AIF, ANI/CUR, ASF, AU/SND, AVI, BMP/DIB, CAM (Casio JPG), CLP, Dicom/ACR, DJVU, EMF/WMF, EPS, FlashPix (FPX), FSH, G3, GIF, ICO/ICL/EXE/DLL, IFF/LBM, IMG (GEM), JPG2000, JPG/JPEG, KDC, LDF, LWF, MED, MID/RMI, MOV, MP3, MPG/MPEG, NLM/NOL/NGG, PBM/PGM/PPM, PCX/DCX, PhotoCD, PNG, PSD, PSP, RAS/SUN, RealAudio (RA), RLE, SFF, SFW, SGI/RGB, SWF (Flash/Shockwave), TGA, TIF/TIFF, WAV, WBMP, XBM, XPM.

Support for Apple QuickTime allows IrfanView to read following formats:

MOV, QTIF, Mac PICT, FLI/FLC

The Windows Media Player plug-in allows IrfanView to read following formats:

ASF, AU/SND/AIF, AVI, DAT (VideoCD), MID/RMI, MOV, MP3, MPG/MPEG, WAV, WMA, WMF

Irfan View is extremely fast to load images, supports animated GIFs, has a superb thumbnail and preview options, easily configurable slideshow, wonderful batch filename conversion, Audio CD player, e-mail options, print options, drag and drop, extracts icons from EXEs and DLLs, many hotkeys, and many command-line options. Stroud's CWSApps lists Irfan View as its third highest ranking graphics application, after Adobe Photoshop v6.0.1 and Paint Shop Pro v7.04, two full image editing software packages. In their ranking, Irfan View ranked just ahead of Firehand Ember Millennium v5.1.2 and Thumbs Plus v4.50 two other graphics file management and viewing utilities.

Overall, I think that Irfan View is one of the most useful utilities around. I use it very regularly in my work, where I need to manage many directories of images, some for Websites in development, others for projects, and still others for articles, documents, and other publications. It is a phenomenal application and I recommend it highly to everyone using Windows.

Please send your comments and suggestions for disk of the month to me at:

mikekato@tokyopc.org.

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