Last week, I was attempting to view a few pictures on a Windows 2000 machine (to be more precise, it was more like 150 pictures on a Pentium 2) and selecting a limited amount to save to another machine. Windows 2000 has a distinct lack of multimedia capability, in this regard. To view all 150 pictures, I would have to squint at the thumbnails (after it loaded), guess which ones looked half decent, then double click on them (waiting forever, again, for it to open in paint) and repeat this process. I ran out of patience really fast. At this point, I started to look for a program to come to the rescue. As always, I found one that fit the need, perfectly.

Irfanview is a freeware image viewer / editor for Windows. It is a great tool to compliment XP’s built in “Picture and Fax Viewer” or to take over in its place on older operating systems. Although the program is not technically “Open Source,” I reviewed it in this column because of its functionality, the fact that there is no, payment required, “ultra” version of it, and because you have direct input with the actual developer – that is about as close to Open Source as you can come! You can download Irfanview here.

Irfanview, despite its strange name, is actually quite a nice software package. Its basic function is image viewing, but it has several editing options available to suit basic needs. Irfanview is works well with GIMP because you can view / crop in Irfanview and then apply effects to the image, later, in GIMP.

One of my favorite features, and the one that saved me the most time, is the option on the toolbar to view the next file in the directory. You can click the arrows and navigate very efficiently with this feature, saving you the tedious time of going file>open and finding the next picture.

Irfanview was designed to be very easy to use. This was evident as soon as it was opened on my computer. I am a big fan of Photoshop, but trying to learn it, even to do relatively basic stuff is extremely hard. With Irfanview, its very simple and laid out for you.

I found Irfanview to be very efficient with memory management. It does not lag much, if any, when loading pictures; even when rotating or applying effects to them, there is only a hardly noticeable pause. Overall memory usage is also excellent, I found that it ran on very little system resources compared to its competitors.

Unlike a few other “free” image viewers, Irfanview is not loaded down with spyware. I noticed a link to Ebay on the main window, but other than that, the program is perfectly clean. It runs very smoothly, and is so effective that you will not notice a difference in system performance after it is installed.

Irfanview supports almost all image formats you could ever think of, including animated GIFs, jpegs, png, psd, TIFF, raw. A complete list of image formats supported can be found at their website.

Irfanview has many plugins available to make the program truly customizable. These plugins can be downloaded as one large file and installed together, so you can have all of them at once. Plugins add features such as Quicktime support, AVI support, E-Mail support, and much more. Overall, Irfanview is a great program and an essential addition to any computer running an Windows Operating System prior to XP. Even computers with XP could benefit from Irfanview’s capabilities, as it has more supported formats and options.

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