Saturday, September 26, 2009

Tools - IrfanView


IrfanView is a free image viewer. It's pretty lightweight and very customizable with the number of plugins available for it. With the proper plugins, it can play mp3s or even movies, become an image editor or open a pdf file. I don't use those features, though since I have other programs doing that already.

But one thing that IrfanView has that I like very much is that it can perform batch editing. You can rename/convert/resize several items at once. Pretty useful to keep your images (or other files) properly organized.



You can set so that it only opens files with a certain extension. If there are a variety of files in your folder, it wont open every single file as you scroll through the folder. Pretty useful if you happen to have an image folder with some pdf files inside, and IrfanView takes forever to load the pdf that you didn't want to load in the first place.


The current version is 4.25 which I am loving as it now comes with a unicode plugin. The previous versions have problems opening files that have Japanese or Chinese characters.


If there's one thing I don't like about IrfanView is its ugly road killed cat icon. But nothing like some third party icons (or draw some yourself) can fix.


Enabling the icons (v4.25):
  1. Place the "Icon.dll" file in the IrfanView plugin folder (normally, it's "C:\Program Files\IrfanView\Plugins")
  2. Options -> Properties/Settings... -> Icons
  3. Enable the "Use different icons (Icons-Plugin)" radio button.
  4. Hit ok.
  5. If the radio button is already selected, select another icon and repeat step 2 again.


Go to: www.irfanview.com 

1 comment:

Todaydownload.com said...

These facts are really interesting. Few of them were well known for me but many of them were brand new for me too!
I will print this one out and show to my friends because they will be definitely interested in that. Thanks!
IrfanView