[HN Gopher] IrfanView
___________________________________________________________________
IrfanView
Author : omnibrain
Score : 254 points
Date : 2024-03-30 13:56 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.irfanview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.irfanview.com)
| meristohm wrote:
| Back when i used Windows, IrfanView was my go-to image viewer,
| downloaded along with SumatraPDF via ninite.com. There's
| something similar in the repositories in Software Manager on
| Linux Mint, and Pix is fuller-featured, but like Foobar2000 for
| music, I still miss IrfanView from time to time, probably because
| of muscle memory and being more impressionable back then.
| (There's almostt certainly a way to get these Windows programs
| running on LMDE, I just don't care enough to mess with it.)
| pestatije wrote:
| i use it to see .sid images...never found any other way to open
| those
| cess11 wrote:
| Is QGIS too bulky?
| techknight wrote:
| In Windows it's still faster than anything else if you've copied
| an image to clipboard to open irfanview -> paste -> save, or to
| do a quick crop or whatever.
| respondo2134 wrote:
| for those increasingly rare times you want to print an image
| it's great too.
| verstandhandel wrote:
| or just the batch mode ... very helpful and fast.
| respondo2134 wrote:
| irfanview for images, vlc for videos, foobar for audio - so much
| better than anything bundled with windows since forever
| Pigalowda wrote:
| And greenshot for snipping!
| haunter wrote:
| ShareX
| pawelduda wrote:
| Never could get into foobar... team winamp here
| poisonborz wrote:
| That is long dead, try AIMP, it even supports Winamp dsp-s.
| furyofantares wrote:
| voidtools/everything for filesystem
| esafak wrote:
| Windows was good for shareware developers because people had to
| buy utilities to like Irfanview to basically replace all the junk
| the OS shipped with. I eventually drop-kicked the whole OS and
| now life is good.
| antegamisou wrote:
| Along with ImageJ, that is open-source and has found use by
| researchers among many different disciplines, they're great
| examples of longstanding projects done right.
| buescher wrote:
| ImageJ has roots (NIH Image) that predate Photoshop.
| playingalong wrote:
| That's my first memory of a program with keyboard shortcuts not
| being the typical ones, but still usable and thought through.
|
| Enter/return to go full screen (or exit from full screen?).
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| One of those things you had to install on a new windows system.
| theoa wrote:
| Still do
| instagraham wrote:
| Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past
| tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best
| image viewer in town, on Windows at least
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Because of a few things:
|
| 1. Windows 11 now ships with quite a decent and powerful image
| viewer/editor that covers most average users' use cases,
| therefore lowering the demand from people to go out of their
| way to find alternatives, like in the Windows XP days, which is
| a good thing (less likely to go download malware from the first
| Google result of "image viewer for Windows XP").
|
| 2. PC usage behavior has changed a lot since then. Many people
| don't even have PCs at home anymore, and people now have most
| of their pics in the cloud or on their phone or some external
| NAS that comes with it's own browser viewer app, instead of
| hoarding them all on their home PC hard drive, further lowering
| the need to seek out dedicated image viewers to manage giant
| offline collections of digital camera pics(I mean I still do,
| but I'm a minority nowadays).
|
| These two factors combined meant the death of the third party
| PC image viewer app. Yeah, Irfan might be "the best", but the
| need for the best in this sector has declined significantly,
| and most users are now fine with "good enough".
| typon wrote:
| The "enshittification" of computing. The Windows 11 default
| Photo Viewer has probably 20% of the features of IrfanView -
| and the problem is that normal users don't know a better tool
| exists for free if they need those extra features. As the
| resident techie in my house I get asked by people to do
| simple things like overlay text in a certain style or print a
| photo with a particular resolution or print multiple photos
| etc. and these tasks are just harder or impossible with the
| default tools
| broast wrote:
| I'm guessing even if they knew the tool existed they would
| still rather ask you to do it. Not everyone wants to
| understand computers or download programs
| copperx wrote:
| More importantly, not everybody wants to be entirely self
| reliant. They're ok with small task delegation.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| Sometimes you don't realize things about yourself until
| someone else puts it into words. Thank you, internet
| stranger
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Does the Windows 11 photo viewer still have that gross
| flickering when changing images and absurdly slow startup
| that the Windows 10 photo viewer added when they replaced the
| old Vista/7 viewer, which had none of these issues?
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| What flickering do you have? I don't see any. As for
| startup time, I dunno, seems to open in less than half a
| second for me, though on a relatively high end laptop. On a
| 10 year old machine it might suffer.
| nutrie wrote:
| I rarely use Windows these days, but IrfanView feels
| lightning fast compared to the built-in Photos app or
| whatever they call it. I started using IV I think on Win
| 98 and it's still as snappy and reliable as it always has
| been.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I haven't used the latest Windows viewer because I'm no
| longer prepared to upgrade to the latest versions of
| Windows, but the old version was a dog of a program
| compared to IrfanView, it was slow, couldn't display many
| formats and would misbehave if the image files were
| damaged.
|
| And yes, at times it flickers and or images can tear.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| The recent photo viewer is great. I never felt the need
| to install Irfan anymore just to view photos since .. a
| long time now.
|
| I mean why would I? If all I need is viewing a couple of
| photos every now and then, cropping and rotating one or
| two and drawing some circles on them to highlight
| something in a screenshot and Windows already does that
| then why bother with Irfan other than habit and
| nostalgia.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _"...and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or
| on their phone, "_
|
| ...until Google closes their account or their data becomes
| otherwise inaccessible!
|
| It horrifies me that so many people are so willing to commit
| their valuable data to the cloud just because of convenience.
|
| Leaving aside Big Tech's spying on users and selling away
| their privacy, users who commit data to the cloud put its
| integrity and ultimately its long-term survival in the hands
| of third parties who couldn't give a damn whether it was lost
| or destroyed--their only interest is the income it generates.
|
| That the shift to the cloud has been so complete is very
| disconcerting. It never ceases to amaze me that so many are
| so trusting of others that they'd actually hand over their
| valuable data for safekeeping to the likes of Google, et al.
| I've used the internet since before the inception of the Web
| and I've never once committed any of my data to the cloud
| (but if I had to then it'd be an encrypted backup).
|
| Re IrfanView, I used to use Ed Hamrick's rather excellent
| image viewer VuePrint until I came across IrfanView about two
| decades ago. For numerous reasons IrfanView is the best
| viewer out there.
| jenscow wrote:
| Because the chances of Google closing accounts or losing
| data is much lower than a consumer's usb drive being
| damaged or lost.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| ...that wasn't the point? Keeping possessions safe is the
| responsibility of the possessor. If you keep them all in
| one place with no backups, you can lose them more easily.
|
| And by the way, you don't actually know the probability
| of a random person losing access to a Google account vs
| losing physical mediums, let alone how many of those
| cases were cases where their only photos were stored
| there. It's obviously different from person to person,
| and maybe you can estimate that one is safer than the
| other in individual cases, but you can't extrapolate that
| and say it applies in every person's case. But the GP was
| referring to cases where it was implied the only copy was
| stored on the cloud.
| overtomanu wrote:
| Plus, it is convenient to sync photos directly from
| mobile to the cloud without the need to set up syncing
| software or do periodic transfer/backup from mobile to
| PC.
| dpacmittal wrote:
| > It horrifies me that so many people are so willing to
| commit their valuable data to the cloud just because of
| convenience.
|
| I used to get horrified too until I learned that average
| user doesn't care much about losing pictures. My wife has
| lost phone full of pics multiple times and she's upset for
| like few hours.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| This is an important insight.
|
| It's easy to obsess over the idea of _any_ data loss,
| because the value of _some_ data is quite high. But for
| most people in most circumstances losing their cloud
| hosted photos is probably not a big deal, and it 's also
| probably far less likely than the users losing locally
| stored photos due to some mistake of their own.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| You don't know what you've lost until it's something you
| want to re-live or remember.
|
| I go back through photos and videos of my kids and it
| reminds me that I succeeded at something worthwhile and
| difficult for at least a period of my life. They had a
| blessed childhood.
|
| Food or selfies and even holiday snaps mean little. But
| the kids... that's the raison d'etre.
|
| Overall it's these photos and videos that are my
| strongest motivation for the paranoia-level backup setup
| I have.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Wait a minute, if you don't have copies of data in the
| cloud, you have copies on HDDs and CDRWs? From experience I
| know that those fail within 10 years or so. Lot's of my
| data is already 20+ years in the cloud.
| gsich wrote:
| It's not.
| j45 wrote:
| Alternative?
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| The built-in viewer in windows is fine. I can't really
| think of a feature that it doesn't have that I need. Could
| you say why irfanview gets your vote?
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| The batch image manipulation features it offers are
| pretty handy. Plus you can press L or R to rotate an
| image and it has lossless rotate options as well.
| j45 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it had batch processing capabilities
| before Photoshop.
| jajko wrote:
| The speed, plugins ecosystem, many more formats supported
| out of the box, crop being faster and more intuitive,
| often good enough auto adjust.
|
| Irfan for images and vlc for video is the name of the
| game for me (and total commander for file management, the
| efficiency compared to simpler stuff is still in wow
| territory).
| j45 wrote:
| IrfanView started so long ago, got and stayed so far
| ahead.
|
| Wish there was a mac version, but it can be run in an
| emulator easy enough.
| copperx wrote:
| DidectoryOpus is even better, but it's expensive.
| card_zero wrote:
| It's also a paint tool (edit->show paint dialog), and
| does tricks like swapping channels or repeating the image
| as a grid of tiles, which are handy when programming
| something involving raster graphics or textures.
| jacekm wrote:
| It's about speed mostly. And I got used to the shortcuts,
| ctrl+r to resize, 'i' to check image metadata. I don't
| really use any of the editing features (I use Paint.NET
| for edits). In theory I don't need a dedicated image
| viewer but I like IrfanView so much that I even paid for
| it so I can have it on company's laptop.
| j45 wrote:
| Install it and you'll see within 5-10 minutes the next
| time you have go through a bunch of images, or do
| something to a bunch of images.
|
| IrfanView likely still supports more formats, since it
| was earlier than any other tool. This means any edge
| cases in file encoding that might not work, or render
| ideally likely has been solved there first.
|
| It probably has some batch file conversion tricks in it
| too.
|
| IrfanView also provided for free for a lot of years what
| was hard to get without paying. If it existed on mac I'd
| be all over it.
|
| Ah, the windows viewer always wasn't that good.
|
| And if I remember the big first improvement of it was
| copying a lot of IrfanView.
|
| Since this post, I remembered another old friend that was
| excellent on windows, AcdSEE. Also worth looking into.
| allanrbo wrote:
| It made more sense to go through the effort to install
| IrfanView when there was no image previewer built into windows,
| in the days of Windows 95/98/ME/2000. Those only had MS Paint,
| and I think some versions only supported bmp files (no jpeg or
| gif). Windows XP had an ok image previewer.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > no image previewer built into windows, in the days of
| Windows 95/98/ME/2000
|
| Windows has shipped with an image previewer since Windows ME.
| You can see it in this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/w
| indows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_ima...
| earslap wrote:
| IIRC the killer "feature" that gave these previewers
| traction (ACDSee, IrfanView etc.) was that you could just
| preview a bunch of images in a folder using your arrow
| keys. So you'd just load one and use arrow keys to see the
| other images in the same folder. With the built-in options,
| you'd have to double click images one by one (and close
| their windows one by one) which was a horrible UX compared
| to what these provided.
| lstamour wrote:
| That's the "Preview pane" in explorer. It only supports the
| file types you could preview in explorer, it only "opens"
| the file currently selected in Explorer, and didn't let you
| zoom in or inspect the image in any way that I recall. It
| was a plain preview that was supported (in ME) by the
| integrations Explorer had with Internet Explorer, I
| believe. Often installing IrfanView let you preview more
| file types in Explorer, and you could open more than one,
| display them full screen, edit them, resize them, and
| more...
| abulman wrote:
| Agreed - I'm still using it everyday to view and do some minor
| editing (trimming and resizing pics). It, along with browsers,
| VLC, Putty, and SublimeText (and now also ObsidianMD) are the
| first things I will download to a new Windows PC.
| haunter wrote:
| I use JPEGView nowadays https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview
| Semaphor wrote:
| Does it have feature parity? Just from the list it looks like
| it only supports a small fraction of what Irfan view does.
| netol wrote:
| No that many. It supports the most important ones though,
| and it is the fastest
| thih9 wrote:
| Most people look at images via browser these days.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Who cares what 'most people do'? Why are we constantly
| resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"? Have you
| all forgotten that niche things exist?
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> Who cares what 'most people do'?_
|
| Democracy and economics.
|
| _> Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain
| of "majority rules"?_
|
| It's not constantly, it's the answer to this question. Why
| are you getting your knickers in a twist?
|
| In this case he gave the answer to the question of why
| Irfan view isn't popular anymore and the answer is because
| the majority of people have moved on.
|
| It's not something he decided or that he can change, it's
| just the fact and he's reported it to you. The fact that
| you don't like the reality, is your own issue.
| scubbo wrote:
| > Why are most comments referring to having used this in
| the past tense?
|
| > Who cares what 'most people do'?
|
| Someone trying to understand why _most_ comments reflect a
| certain behaviour is, by definition, someone who cares
| about understanding what "what most people do".
| thih9 wrote:
| Niche things by definition are less popular. In my
| grandparent comment I was explaining why standalone image
| viewers are less popular. Looks like we agree.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _"...via browser these days. "_
|
| 'Most people' = LCD/lowest common denominator.
|
| If one doesn't mind grovelling around at the bottom then
| that's fine.
| broodbucket wrote:
| This seems unnecessarily harsh.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| It may be, but by whose or what standard?
|
| We are now in an age where expected norms in society are
| such that the slightest criticism of anyone--even if
| justified--is taken as offensive by both the recipient
| and by onlookers.
|
| Unfortunately, keeping mum and not saying anything just
| lets people off the hook, they no longer have to justify
| their actions either to themselves or anyone else. In
| fact, I'd argue that in recent years the trend has gotten
| so bad and out of hand that it's having a very noticeable
| negative impact on society.
|
| Clearly, I'm older than you, when I was younger this
| comment would have hardly raised an eyebrow (right, I'm
| old enough to have noticed this societal change and the
| negative impact it's had).
|
| When I was at school we were actively taught to ignore
| unwarranted critism, and even if it were justified to
| consider carefully what was actually said before
| responding. In fact, the old adage that _' sticks and
| stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me'_
| was drummed into us kids at a very early age (in infants
| school). Can you imagin teachers teaching that today? I'd
| reckon they'd likely be lynched.
|
| Now, what's the situation nowadays when kids are no
| longer taught how to develop and strengthen their
| resilience? Well, one only has to look at social media.
| Now we have kids taking great offense at something
| someone has said to them and they're getting upset to
| such an extent that some even resort to suicide. (When I
| was a kid suicide was something that only adults with
| disturbed minds did--never kids or teenagers, it was
| unheard of. No doubt there were isolated instances but we
| kids never heard of them.)
| codetrotter wrote:
| For me it's because I haven't run Windows for ages
| monocasa wrote:
| I've run it via wine for probably close to twenty years now.
| Saris wrote:
| The built in photos app is quite good now, although it can't
| open apple heif files yet.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| It should with the Microsoft HEIF plugin:
| https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pmmsr1cgpwg?hl=en-us
| Saris wrote:
| Thanks! Good to know.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Doesn't work with "live" photos.
| shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote:
| I used to use irfranview for many years, but I rarely ever use
| Windows anymore. I recently started to use oculante [1] for
| image viewer because its cross os. Before that, I used imv on
| Linux and xee on macOS.
|
| 1: https://github.com/woelper/oculante
| dantondwa wrote:
| This is amazing! Thank you for sharing it.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I prefer JPEGView on Windows. What do you think is the best
| alternative for Linux?
| Semaphor wrote:
| Just saw this mentioned above, might as well ask here: why?
| It looks to only support a small fraction of features.
| netol wrote:
| It's faster to load images
| ano-ther wrote:
| It is very much present tense at least to me. It's among the
| first programs on all new Windows machines that I set up.
|
| Plus, there are Windows Store and portable versions which help
| to use it on otherwise locked-down company computers.
| loughnane wrote:
| I was like this too. I moved away from windows machines (to
| Linux) for good in 2019 though so now I don't use it.
|
| If I had to go back it would def be one the first I
| installed.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| XnView is great. Although I had to tweak the CSS to have a
| clean UX removing all the excess edges and separators and add
| dark background.
| nickjj wrote:
| IMO it's up there, I've been using it for over 20+ years.
|
| IrfanView and foobar2000 (mp3 player) haven't left my side
| since I started using them. Ditto (clipboard manager) has also
| earned its place.
| monkpit wrote:
| To add to that, for me mplayer was clutch for a long time,
| nowadays I opt for VLC though.
| integricho wrote:
| mv2player was a really good option for a period of time,
| it's a shame it just disappeared, not even it's source code
| can be found.
| whitten wrote:
| That sounds bad. Is it on any old shareware sites ?
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right, foobar2000 is great isn't it?
| baq wrote:
| Of the three, ditto easily takes no. 1 spot. Must've saved me
| weeks of juggling windows and trying to remember where stuff
| was at this point. It's a superpower, a true game changer if
| I ever saw one.
|
| Maccy on macOS is about half as good which is still an
| absolute unit of a tool. Couldn't use a Mac without it.
| fmajid wrote:
| Because many HN readers have moved on from Windows.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wish I had corporate credit card... I could get myself copy for
| work...
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 4MB to download the installer, back in the days when programs
| just did the thing they did and didn't include runtimes for
| entire virtual environments.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| An average PC also had 64-256MB of RAM instead of 8-32GB.
| vitro wrote:
| I told my friend once: - "I have 8MB of RAM" - "That's cool,
| imagine having 16..."
| stevesimmons wrote:
| My first computer had 3583 bytes of RAM...
| AlienRobot wrote:
| But what if you want to display Full HD video in the image
| viewer from an URL? Wouldn't you need Electron for that?
|
| Also I was under the impression just the DLLs for all the image
| formats would be over 4 MB. I wonder how large is it
| uncompressed.
| anta40 wrote:
| IrfanView is one of my "must to have apps", going back to Win 98.
| For simple image editing (resizing, cropping etc) and batch
| processing, it's though to beat.
|
| Now I mostly work on macOS, and miss it. I guess XnView is close
| enough.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Same, using it since 1998 (I was 9, 35 now).
|
| Any windows PC I use doesn't feel right without the irfanview
| logo somewhere.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| I love(d) infan view, but just got used to (a portable version
| of) Xnview. I keep going back to irfan, but again - as much as
| it is an amazing piece of software, Xn for me.
| donatj wrote:
| That's a name I have not heard in a long while. I used to use it
| back on Windows 95 because it was a faster way to view JPEGs than
| opening Internet Explorer. Everything about that makes me feel
| old.
| 101008 wrote:
| I opened the link first and I kept a few seconds trying to
| remember what we had to use to open JPEGs and GIFs back then.
| Then I read your comment. Right, IE for images. What a fun
| world we lived on!
| integricho wrote:
| ACDSee 2.4 and 3.1 were similarly legendary and fast in both
| startup time and overall performance of image loading.
| omnibrain wrote:
| When ACDsee got bloated (and the shareware screen to
| nagging) I switched to IrfanView.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >I used to use it back on Windows 95 because it was a faster
| way to view JPEGs than opening Internet Explorer.
|
| That's an amazing sentence. We should frame it and put it in a
| museum. Actually someone should make a book filled just with
| quotes like this, call it "Life Before the Gigahertz" or
| something.
| necubi wrote:
| I see so many comments these days bemoaning how slow modern
| software has gotten, but no one seems to remember/have been
| alive for the time when just rendering an image would take
| multiple seconds.
|
| Just goes to show that our expectations scale with the
| available technology.
| muxator wrote:
| And now decoding a jpeg takes the blink of an eye, but we
| wait five seconds for a widget to render. When it does, we
| click somewhere else, because in that exact moment the
| layout was reflown.
| Terr_ wrote:
| News quotes followed by a link to an audio file that
| discloses its length and probable (larger) time to download.
| bitwize wrote:
| Everybody was down with either IrfanView or ACDSee to look at
| their collection of uudecoded por--er, _photographic human
| figure studies_ they got off USENET.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Still a part of the standard software I install on every new
| install.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| As an only occasional windows user, I certainly wouldn't mind
| seeing such a list, maybe in a GitHub gist if you find
| yourself bored one day :)
| throwup238 wrote:
| Not the OP but I use a subset of the software available on
| https://ninite.com/ (IrfanView included)
| Semaphor wrote:
| Used to use that as well, but the selection was too
| limited for me, so I first switched to chocolatey, and
| nowadays, winget.
|
| This way I can install almost everything I want with one
| command.
|
| I'll post my list tomorrow when I'm back on my PC.
| bxparks wrote:
| For quick cropping, rescaling, and batch processing, this is the
| BEST image editor on _Linux_ (using Wine of course).
| gedy wrote:
| Was a nice tool, but boy I hated seeing it's weird icon on every
| image files (before images had icon previews)
| scotty79 wrote:
| FastStone gang forever
| pdntspa wrote:
| Still the best!
| Dwedit wrote:
| I wish this program was either open source, or had a plugin API.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think it must have some plugin API as it has plenty of
| plugins, but it seems for details you need to contact
| developer.
| pentagrama wrote:
| Around 2000-2007 I used something similar to this one (Windows
| XP/7 times), I can't recall the name right now.
|
| Someone remember other popular image viewers at the time?
| hexagonwin wrote:
| Maybe ACDSee?
| pentagrama wrote:
| That one! Thank you. Nostalgia hit hard.
| ddon wrote:
| Probably it was compupic or acdsee
| genewitch wrote:
| graphic converter for mac OS. I'm still looking for a windows
| or linux image program that lets you do a slideshow and push a
| button to move/copy the current image to preset folders - for
| sorting images.
| loughnane wrote:
| 6MB feels so refreshing.
| redder23 wrote:
| Ah, the nostalgia when Windows what so shitty that you actually
| needed a tool for the simplest of the simplest tasks of viewing
| images in all kinds of formats.
|
| I see no need for it for myself as even Windows has a default
| image viewer that is enough for me and I mainly use Linux anyway
| and every decent distro comes with a tool for that. Gnome and KDE
| both have their own that fit into the DE perfectly.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Windows is still shitty. Same way, I've been on Linux for more
| than a decade already. Windows at work still hugely sucks.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IrfanView
|
| Does anyone know what programming language it is made with? I did
| a cursory search but cannot find any information. Just curious.
| copperx wrote:
| I don't know for sure, but C++ is always a good guess with that
| kind of software.
| rav wrote:
| I downloaded IrfanView and ran "strings" on the exe file, and
| one of the strings in there is "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime
| Library" - so that would point towards C++ (although it's not
| certain from that alone).
| ninkendo wrote:
| Yeah, Irfanview dates to a time when MS's C compiler was
| horribly out of date (still stuck in C89 compatibility),
| and the only way to get remotely modern language features
| was to compile it as C++, even if you never used any C++
| features. Everyone was programming in "C++" on windows back
| then even if they were basically writing C.
|
| So yeah, it's C++ but that doesn't necessarily tell you
| much, it could still very well be basically C.
| refracture wrote:
| Still use it. It's faster to open and move through photos than
| the windows built in one.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Dear Irfan!
|
| Thank you very much.
|
| From myself (1995-...) and my father (1995-2003).
| lencastre wrote:
| When I have a hundred million images scattered on my computer and
| I need to quickly see them, nothing like a good script to herd
| them in a plain txt file and piping it to irfanview! No fidgeting
| with sixels, bat, or any other gui application. Hands down the
| fastest way... IMHO.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| feh is very fast as well. But it is only a viewer and does not
| edit. But under Linux it is my go-to viewer, also for cases
| like the one you describe.
| knighthack wrote:
| I've been using IrfanView since at least 1997, if not earlier in
| 1996.
|
| I still use IrfanView to this day. It's my Swiss knife for a lot
| of simple photo editing work (cropping, resizing, padding, text-
| adding, etc), batch-processing, and for browsing single photos
| through directories.
|
| It's not just good, it's way faster than the bloated
| alternatives.
|
| To top it off, IrfanView works beautifully on my Linux via Wine,
| and also on my Mac M1/M2 machines (and as a tool quicker than
| even Mac's own Preview). It's a primary install for me, whichever
| any platform I'm working on; and a software that's truly a gift
| to the world.
| zerkten wrote:
| How do you get it on macOS?
| millzlane wrote:
| They're doing it via Wine.
| vrinsd wrote:
| If it's for non-commercial use, you might find this a
| spritual equivalent, cross-platform:
|
| https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/
| KronisLV wrote:
| Can vouch that this is a nice piece of software, especially
| the batch convert options (everything from EXIF data,
| rescaling images and various other transformations, as well
| as either replacing the original files or various naming
| options) and supports a bunch of formats.
| nolok wrote:
| You want to open a picture, FAST, no matter the format or
| resolution ?
|
| You want to open a picture and then move from one picture to
| the next in the same folder with arrow keys or mouse scroll,
| again fast and without loading or menus fonctions or whatever ?
|
| You want to batch process a folder to convert all files to png
| with the larger side limited to 2000px, keep the location data
| but reset the orientation data, and remove the original file
| only if conversion succeeded ?
|
| You want to scan something, rotate it and lossy pixelize an
| area ?
|
| You want to resize, convert, re-encode a picture from one
| format to another with tonnes of option without resorting to
| command line because you're on windows and you would like to
| just do it in the same app you use for every photo thing ?
|
| You want to cut a part of a picture, or identify the pixel
| color on a picture, or dozens or other every day operations
| like that ?
|
| You want all of that to be absurdly fast, aka instant, without
| any complex menu or dozens of clicks to get where you need ?
|
| I've been using irfanview since the beginning too, and it's not
| for lack of trying other stuff, it's just so much better. It's
| for me one of those tools, like Everything or Ditto or
| SumatraPDF or 7zip or NAPS2 or ... That just get what they are
| and what they should provide, and do just that, and do it
| right.
| jhalstead wrote:
| Do you have a link for Ditto? Searching for "Ditto app" and
| "Ditto software" returns several possible results for me
| (e.g. clipboard, music app, managing "copy", content
| sharing).
| elrostelperien wrote:
| The most famous is the clipboard one (https://ditto-
| cp.sourceforge.io/). I'd be surprised if they were
| referring to another "Ditto" software.
| nolok wrote:
| You are correct, this is the one I meant. It claims to
| handle windows clipboard "shortcomings" by remember
| previous entries and allowing you to access it easily
| (allowing for multi copy paste situation), and it does
| just that and do it well.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "It's not just good, it's way faster than the bloated
| alternatives."
|
| Another shining endorsement of "modern" software development
| (no, check that... software "engineering")
|
| Before I gave up Windows permanently, and that was over 20
| years ago, I used this program.
|
| The more things "change" the more they stay the same.
| darreninthenet wrote:
| Is there a Mac version or do you run it on Mac under
| Wine/Crossover?
| flas9sd wrote:
| love that the author still uses the same dithered photos of
| Jajce, Bosnia - his hometown - as in Win9x days in the about page
| and website: https://www.irfanview.com/main_about.htm .. make me
| want to visit.
|
| Edit: typo (thanks)
| shrx wrote:
| Jajce, not Jacje. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jajce
| colineartheta wrote:
| Maybe I'll get some hate for this, but years ago when I worked at
| a civil engineering firm this was the default image viewer IT had
| mapped every image file to open with - it was a nightmare! Every
| coworker I had (myself included) would constantly complain about
| the number of times they had to change to [literally anything
| else]. There were three distinct things I remember we all hated:
| 1. The image never opened full size, the window was always small
| and you had to manually drag the window frame to make it
| viewable. 2. It didn't "zoom in" when you used your mouse wheel
| correctly, it would instead cycle through all of the images open
| in the folder you were working in. 3. When you clicked the arrows
| at the top to flip through a group of photos in the folder you
| were in (I recall the keyboard arrow keys not working for this,
| too), once you reached the end it would go to a black "fake"
| image, that you then couldn't arrow back. It didn't just cycle
| through the images, you had to close the window and reopen the
| image you were on.
|
| Needless to say, I have zero fond memories of this program. Maybe
| these were nuances of our particular setup (many other such cases
| at that firm, sadly), but...eh, whatever. There's better out
| there.
| airstrike wrote:
| Those are all settings you could have changed yourself.
| IrfanView is the best image viewer on Windows, hands down.
| colineartheta wrote:
| Expressing a viewpoint necessitates a downvote?
| baq wrote:
| See also complaining about downvotes.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| And not once in all this time did you open settings and change
| these behaviours (which you can)? Weird.
| colineartheta wrote:
| Not once in all that time did I consider using a program with
| hostile default settings. Weird how hard this might be for an
| image viewer.
| shlubbert wrote:
| I'm with you. To me IrfanView always felt incredibly archaic
| and chaotic, and I never wanted to wade through its 5 billion
| settings to "fix" it for me. But I guess some people just care
| more about UX while others just want as many features as
| possible, and I'm glad it's there for the latter camp.
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| this ... and its text file counterpart ... Notepad++ ... glorious
| Windows 95. sounds strange but one reason why I'm now on Linux
| (Mint Cinnamon) is because I liked Windows 95 and XP so much.
| it's practically the same UI. no tile nonsense. a task bar. a
| start menu. a good ole desktop. beautiful. (and I also want to
| mention I did at least once donate to IrfanView /
| https://www.irfanview.com/main_support_engl.htm)
| grzeshru wrote:
| IrfanView shouldn't be seen as a relic just because it's "old".
| Software like IV, Opus/Far just highlight how inadequate the OS
| provided tools for common navigation/viewing patterns are. Anyone
| who breaks through the "the computer is a magical box and I don't
| understand any of it" barrier needs to have a manual tossed at
| them that covers this software right away. Nevermind gdb/WinDbg.
| omnibrain wrote:
| IrfanView has a nice feature where it can monitor a folder and
| always show the newest picture. I used that for a selfie-photo-
| station for my wedding. A little more details here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37219826
|
| Another feature I use often ist to copy the current image to a
| preset location. I use that for quickly pre-sorting photos.
| buescher wrote:
| No one else misses Picasa?
| chrnola wrote:
| Sometimes, but the differences in performance between the two
| were quite vast if I recall correctly.
| creatonez wrote:
| I've found nomacs to be a good alternative:
|
| https://nomacs.org/
|
| It hits the sweet spot when it comes to clipboard functionality
| -- You can either copy the image itself, or copy its path on the
| filesystem. Most image viewers only support one of these
| commands.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| IrfanView is great, but I'm curious, why is it on top of HN today
| of all days? Was there something significant happening?
| huytersd wrote:
| It happens every now and then. Could be as simple as nostalgia.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Irfanview is so fast that I don't need to convert image sequences
| to video format. I can just press and hold right arrow key. I do
| wish there was a way to limit the speed though.
| n3storm wrote:
| I think I used it from 1997 till 2001, all years I owned a
| windows pc. And until 2005 at windows pc at work.
| joshxyz wrote:
| this is the sumatra pdf of images
| 9witz wrote:
| Have used it since forever. Just used it today an hour ago.
| Usually to paste a windows screenshot and then do minor editing
| or cropping.
|
| Now windows has gotten a lot better, with the [WIN][Shift][s]
| shortcut (so cropping no longer is necessary). But that still
| misses a feature to quickly draw an arrow.
|
| Irfanview has that. Screenshot, crop, F12, put an arrow to point
| at something, copy, paste into Teams.
|
| So fast...
| mikl wrote:
| IrfanView. Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
| Haven't used that the last couple of decades. Interesting to see
| that it's still around.
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