73 replies
1d1h
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
43 replies
23h28m
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.
20 replies
22h23m
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.
15 replies
21h7m
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).
13 replies
20h59m
The most famous is the clipboard one (https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/). I'd be surprised if they were referring to another "Ditto" software.
12 replies
20h34m
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.
11 replies
17h50m
BTW windows now ship with a clipboard tool like this using Windows + V shortcut. I use other tools you mentioned already though. Need to try ditto. Is there a list of similarly *fast* alternatives like this for windows (+other OSes)?
10 replies
16h50m
Idk if this is still the case but back when I tried the built in clipboard history when it was first released, it didn’t handle formatted text well, nor did it handle multi-media particularly well, if at all.
One of the best parts about ditto is that you can choose to paste with or without formatting
6 replies
15h12m
The are indeed many clipboard managers across all platforms, but none have the perfect UI of ditto. Its ditto's UI that needs to be copied everywhere else.
5 replies
12h11m
Haven't used Ditto before but I use CopyQ on Linux, at least according to the screenshots of Ditto it appears that CopyQ has been influenced by it
4 replies
11h41m
Maccy on MacOS is perfect: https://maccy.app/
3 replies
10h28m
I use maccy on my wife’s Mac and don’t love it, maybe it’s bec I’m still not comfortable with Mac keyboard shortcuts or maybe it’s just the UI, but there’s something about it that feels less baked than ditto.
2 replies
9h11m
I don’t know ditto but on maccy it’s just the paste shortcut (for the last copy) plus a number (if you need an older copy). Could it be easier?
1 replies
7h6m
A way to sort of "alt-tab" between copy versions instead of separate keypresses for each?
0 replies
3h56m
I don't understand what you mean. Sorting: There is no shortcut for sorting. However, I have never needed this either, because the search via regular expressions Fuzzy or a mixture of both works very well.
1 replies
8h21m
Doesn't Ctrl+Shift+v already paste without formatting?
0 replies
3h17m
That's what it claims to do in many apps, yes. I still end up pasting into notepad and copying from there to get real paste-without-formatting.
0 replies
16h2m
The Windows clipboard history tool works with images. Screenshots, at least, but I think others as well.
0 replies
3h27m
Raycast packages a few of these into a modern app as well. Clipboard, Searching files, Window management. Very lightweight though part of a different generation so more "bloated" in some people's eyes. Low resources used though.
1 replies
16h16m
I use sumatra for how lightweight and fast it is. 7zip is just uncontested. I wish Ditto had copycats on linux and macos. It's just sublime.
I've never used irfanview though, I'm too quick to judge from the UI of an app xD
I see all those buttons on IrfanView and how it opens as an explorer of pictures rather than just a simple Photo Viewer with arrows to go back and forth and closed it. qView is my fav right now. It does exactly what I need from a viewer. It views. I rarely need editing.
Nowadays if I need editing I just open Photopea.
If I need batch editing/converting I open XnConvert.
tl;dr IfranView is probably amazing, but just like all those buttons on np++ I pre-judge and find simpler things
0 replies
15h45m
I haven't used Ditto so I don't know how closely macOS clipboard managers compare to it, but there's certainly a fair number of programs for the Mac out there that sound similar to Ditto's own description, from the free, open source Maccy to the somewhat over-the-top $13 Pastebot. There are other utility programs that include similar functionality; personally, I'm using Alfred, a keyboard-driven launcher, which also includes a pretty good clipboard manager (and is the sort of app that I'd be looking for copycats for on Linux if I ever made the switch back!).
0 replies
8h44m
Everything is the best program I have ever used.
I couldn't live without it at this point. It would be like cutting off both arms.
0 replies
7h17m
I'd be interested in your list of must have, the one you've mentioned mirror mine, though I've never heard of NAPS2. A few of mine:
Treesheets Zim wiki Notepad++ Autohotkey
10 replies
22h52m
How do you get it on macOS?
8 replies
22h29m
If it's for non-commercial use, you might find this a spritual equivalent, cross-platform:
6 replies
19h5m
This comment is baffling. Just so you know, the IrfanView license requires commercial users to pay for a license, just like XnView does. Apparently that's... bad?
2 replies
9h17m
How did the comment in any way make it sound bad?
1 replies
4h59m
"If it's for non-commercial use."
0 replies
4h48m
That’s a neutral fact, not a negative spin.
1 replies
8h29m
also allowed in commercial settings (BSD style license):
Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/
open-source, ignore the simple web page, software is awesome.
0 replies
4h57m
Thank God there's a BSD-licensed option. The notion that a business would pay to use software because the license requires it is just... appalling.
0 replies
14h8m
I didn't remember what the IrfanView license was/is but IrfanView is not cross-platform which is what I was responding to with an alternative.
0 replies
21h27m
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.
0 replies
22h30m
They're doing it via Wine.
5 replies
20h34m
"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.
2 replies
17h16m
Is IRFan Windows-only?
Looks like it, too bad, this would be amazing to have on Linux.
0 replies
8h35m
I used Gwenview back in the days in Linux. I think it's still great.
0 replies
10h58m
If you didn't happen to see it, this is from knighthack's comment above:
"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."
0 replies
2h3m
I remember we had to pull it from our educational institution because his about used to "jokingly" reference soliciting nudes.
(The dozen women should send me pictures of themselves in the nude ;-) (joke) )
https://web.archive.org/web/20090106143615/https://www.irfan...
0 replies
18h41m
Sounds like IrfanView just needs more PM's and VC's
2 replies
11h30m
For MacOS, I wonder if it's faster than XNView MP. This was the fastest image viewer I could find for Apple Silicon. Also are you running it through Wine on MacOS or how do you get it working?
1 replies
8h48m
Ever tried Phoenix Slides (open source, long history)? It's definitely faster than Preview for me on large images:
0 replies
4h41m
Never heard of it. Just threw some very highres jpeg2000 images at it and wow, i am blown away. It runs circles around XnView MP (and preview) on these!! Thanks :)
0 replies
9h14m
It's not just good, it's way faster than the bloated alternatives.
I use Faststone, what am I missing?
0 replies
19h35m
Is there a Mac version or do you run it on Mac under Wine/Crossover?
33 replies
1d
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.
21 replies
23h40m
Still a part of the standard software I install on every new install.
20 replies
23h18m
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 :)
16 replies
19h23m
Each their own, that's mine. Note that this is not a tech user or developper list, but the list of what I install on any new windows pc, including those at work etc ...
7zip (open any archive)
VLC (open any audio/video file)
IrfanView (+ the "all plugins" installer on the same page, open any picture file)
SumatraPDF (read PDFs)
Libreoffice (to open any office files)
NAPS2 (easy scan, and split/merge/... PDFs)
Ditto (give your clipboard a memory)
Everything (an instant file search that works)
TeraCopy (replace windows copy with queue, queues, add files to the queue instead of starting a second parallel copy, pause that works, ...)
Powertoys (so many to list ... mass rename file easily, screen ruler, text extractor ...)
If it's appropriate : Qbittorent (clean torrent client)
Nvidia graphic card ? NVCleaninstall, so you can install just the clean driver you need
Windows 10 or 11 ? O&O Shut Up (to disable all the telemetry and onedrive in one click, there are plenty alternatives but I sort of like this one)
Windows 11 ? ExplorerPatcher to remove suggestions in the start menu and the new and terrible castrated contextual menu
And of course your browser of choice and extensions
In ten minutes you have a computer that feels much more smart and usable. There are plenty of great software out there, but I feel like many what to install lists are very topical or include software you won't use in many cases or once every 6 months, so this is my short list of what you will use essentially every time you use the computer.
4 replies
14h30m
Not using windows much anymore, but great to hear about O&O and ExplorerPatcher. I notice you don't list an ssh client. I still install cygwin for that. Anything new besides putty?
0 replies
12h42m
PowerShell. Is there anything that putty do better?
0 replies
8h37m
SSH client is not for non tech users and I tried to keep my list non tech oriented, something you can install on yours, your mom or Janice from accounting and they will all benefit from it.
For SSH I was a die hard team PuTTy for a long time but these days one of the first thing I install on my windows computer is WSL and a Debian inside, that covers all my SSH needs.
0 replies
12h9m
Windows now has OpenSSH https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
0 replies
11h55m
Windows now have OpenSSH client (and server) available as optional features. Together with the new terminal the ssh client seems to be working fine. Personally I usually opt in to use the ssh in WSL as I keep it installed on all my Windows machines.
3 replies
10h51m
adding mine
TreeSize (to easily find out what is consuming disk space)
picpick/ shareX (screenshotting with annotationsand autosave)
pdftk (pdf merge, split, crop, interleave(
ffmpeg (video trim, split, re-encode, etc.)
Lossless cut (GUI for ffmpeg trim and extract/add tracks)
OpenShot video editor (when DaVinci Resolve is too much for the job and you need simple edits and effects)
OBS Studio (screen record, stream to youtube)
2 replies
10h19m
Wiztree is a good alternative to Tree size, it's almost instantaneous
1 replies
5h45m
Or the good (old) Scanner from http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/ (a <1MB executable)
0 replies
4h23m
I'm partial to spacesniffer for that http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/
1 replies
16h51m
Thanks for sharing your list; I already use many of them but learnt about a few new ones that I'll try. I second Everything, the best, nifty little, Windows search utility that is blazing fast.
0 replies
15h9m
I find everything is more than just file search. It often works super well as a stand alone file manager.
1 replies
18h33m
I recently started having trouble with 7zip at work due to shared sharepoint folders and the like. I wound up finding ZanaZip which was forked from 7zip but keeps up with modern OS changes.
0 replies
2h46m
Do you mean NanaZip?
0 replies
15h33m
Some alternatives to these items: I like bandizip for zip needs
MPC-BE for video/audio
XnViewMP
Firefox for PDFs
MS office web (no need to install anything)
Windows 10+ includes clipboard history
PowerToys does have a file search, not sure how it compares to Everything
0 replies
12h38m
A worthy competitor to vlc is potplayer
0 replies
15h4m
You only left out Bulk Renamed Utility https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk There are many like it but none finer.
1 replies
21h41m
Not the OP but I use a subset of the software available on https://ninite.com/ (IrfanView included)
0 replies
21h29m
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.
0 replies
10h27m
This is my list, but it’s pretty opinionated and is missing some pieces: Backblaze Backupper, Canon CaptureOnTouch, YNAB CLassic, and GPSoft’s Directory Opus
https://gist.github.com/Christoph-Wagner/c26ee84105edd12b4d3...
4 replies
1d
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.
2 replies
23h38m
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.
0 replies
21h25m
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.
0 replies
11h42m
i remember watching images download and how relevant progressive rendering was. blurry shapes!
0 replies
21h3m
News quotes followed by a link to an audio file that discloses its length and probable (larger) time to download.
4 replies
1d
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!
3 replies
23h8m
ACDSee 2.4 and 3.1 were similarly legendary and fast in both startup time and overall performance of image loading.
1 replies
22h19m
When ACDsee got bloated (and the shareware screen to nagging) I switched to IrfanView.
0 replies
6h13m
ACDsee just kept getting worse until it just became unbearable. I did miss the image sorting abilities until I found PhotoSift.
0 replies
8h38m
Also remember the times... I think ACDsee 2.3.x was a game changer on Windows systems with little memory back in the day... it was so fast and displayed partially on the fly.
Btw I use a Mac nowadays and I get strong ACDsee vibes from open-source Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/ with browsing through images with the mouse-wheel ;)
0 replies
23h49m
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.
13 replies
1d
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.
6 replies
23h58m
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.
2 replies
19h20m
FYI, Irfanview might not be able to pull it from an url, but it's playing ful hd video just fine although I wouldn't use it for that.
1 replies
17h47m
it plays full HD video
WHAT? IN 4 MB??? WHAT???
That's amazing!
0 replies
14h46m
I'm just at the Revision demoparty in Germany, you should see the audiovisual stuff people are doing in 4kb (yes, 4096 bytes)!
Modern operating systems and especially web dev have made entire generations forget how powerful computers and software are / can be.
1 replies
5h52m
This is the lightest fastest yet feature rich media player for windows I know. Its 12 MB compressed though. Didn't know irfanview could do that
0 replies
12m
Your link is the old/abandonware mpc-hc, here you'll find a more recent version
0 replies
12h7m
The Windows standard file open dialog allows you to paste a http(s) link in, which will be downloaded and opened from the Temp folder. This works with all applications that use that dialog.
5 replies
1d
An average PC also had 64-256MB of RAM instead of 8-32GB.
4 replies
1d
I told my friend once: - "I have 8MB of RAM" - "That's cool, imagine having 16..."
3 replies
19h27m
My first computer had 3583 bytes of RAM...
2 replies
19h11m
Were those 8-bit bytes?
1 replies
15h16m
Is there any other kind of byte?
0 replies
12h24m
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used.[4][5][6][7] The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables[a] or slab, before the term byte became common.
The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte, as 2 to the power of 8 is 256.[8] The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte.[9] Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Buchholz_1956_1...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_ref-Buchholz_1956_1_...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Rao_1989-6
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Tafel_1971-7
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-ISO_IEC_2382-1_...
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-CHM_1964-10
9 replies
1d1h
irfanview for images, vlc for videos, foobar for audio - so much better than anything bundled with windows since forever
4 replies
1d
Never could get into foobar... team winamp here
1 replies
20h11m
That is long dead, try AIMP, it even supports Winamp dsp-s.
0 replies
4h6m
The most important part of Winamp is the global keyboard shortcuts you can set up. I have been using wasd controls for my games and my player since forever. Well, since I found the global keyboard shortcuts in winamp...
wasd for games, ctrl+shift+qewasd for play/pause/forward/backward/next/prev and so on. Don't need to switch window, don't need to move hand away from wasd. Can't live without it now even though I don't have so much playtime any more. Works just as well in any other environment.
0 replies
16h22m
Same. If I'm listening to music with something other than Winamp (and the default Classic skin), I feel weird.
0 replies
5h21m
Is Winamp as we know it still around?
1 replies
1d
And greenshot for snipping!
0 replies
21h45m
ShareX
0 replies
11h1m
I am often disappointed by the lack of shortcuts and features in VLC compared to Potplayer.
Just some of the few keyboard shortcuts in Potplayer I use regularly:
"<" and ">" to shift the subtitle sync by half a secondd "shift-<" and "shift->" to adjust the audio sync by half a second "[" and "]" to set an A-B repeat of that awesome scene or soundtrack "D" and "F" to move by a single frame forward and backward there's also shortcut to decrease and increase things like saturation and brightness by 1% or shortcuts for 0.5x, 1x, 2x size.
I have to make do with SMplayer in Linux which is awesome but you have to setup the keyboard shortcuts manually yourself.
0 replies
22h0m
voidtools/everything for filesystem
9 replies
22h40m
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.
3 replies
22h38m
Those are all settings you could have changed yourself. IrfanView is the best image viewer on Windows, hands down.
2 replies
22h37m
Expressing a viewpoint necessitates a downvote?
0 replies
21h12m
See also complaining about downvotes.
0 replies
18h49m
Nothing wrong with expressing an opinion, and I'm not here to defend you against downvoters, but from my perspective it's an uninformed opinion. All of the "issues" you identified are really just preferences and the dev was kind enough to let you configure the app as you'd like. It would be impossible for the dev to create a set of custom settings that every user finds perfect, so your other comment about "hostile defaults" comes across as entitled
The app is incredibly good. It does everything you could want, it's less than 10MB, blazing fast and easy to use. Super configurable. I used to have to fight with IT to have it installed or find a way to run some portable version just to have it at work.
I can't speak for others, but I think if you had spent a little bit more time trying to figure out the solution to the issues you identify, you would have found the answer, but somehow you are instead blaming the dev, which is what IMHO warrants downvotes.
2 replies
22h34m
And not once in all this time did you open settings and change these behaviours (which you can)? Weird.
1 replies
22h32m
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.
0 replies
25m
Agreed that the Irfanview default settings are questionable in some cases. And I personally find the UI hard to work with because nothing is ever where I expect it to be, with the important display option settings buried in a nested menu.
But it is highly configurable, and I think you're catching grief because it really doesn't sound like you or your colleagues made any attempt to take advantage of that.
0 replies
21h4m
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.
0 replies
19h23m
Dysfunction in the IT of civil engineering (and similar) professions is fairly common. I remember this exact phenomenon too - of Irfanview's default UI controls not suiting what the staff were used to. And the staff didn't need The Most Powerful Tool Under The Sun, they just wanted to view and zoom and browse, and a few other tools, using the keypresses and mouse movements they were used to from previous software.
And Irfanview could do those things in it's sleep with both hands tied, with a few simple config changes. But the dysfunction - often rooted in the minimal, grudging acknowledgement given to IT by (non-IT) old professions - led to a lot of half-assed setups where staff butted their heads against obstacles that were often a mere few clicks away from improvement, if only they'd known to put their attention there. But of course, they were too busy being civil engineers.
And if I may shoehorn another point in here : it's not as though AutoCAD and other such industry software comes with ready default settings. If you used those straight out of the box with no customisation for your own situation, you'd be in deep trouble.
5 replies
23h54m
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?
2 replies
23h53m
Maybe ACDSee?
0 replies
20h19m
That one! Thank you. Nostalgia hit hard.
0 replies
11h4m
I found ACDSee to be better than IrfanView.
0 replies
23h50m
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.
0 replies
23h52m
Probably it was compupic or acdsee
5 replies
20h53m
IrfanView is great, but I'm curious, why is it on top of HN today of all days? Was there something significant happening?
3 replies
19h55m
It happens every now and then. Could be as simple as nostalgia.
2 replies
18h58m
Like Delphi, FreePascal and Lazarus, though less often for those three than for IrfanView, and those three get a good number of sneers by modern ignoramuses, each time. The joke is on them, due to the amount of late night and weekend work (unpaid, often) that many of them have to pull, and tamely accept and try to justify, to save their egos and paychecks.
"The emperor has no clothes" kind of thing ...
And nowadays, layoffs, too ...
1 replies
14h26m
Delphi kicked ass. Though, looking back, it didn't have hash tables at your fingertips like modern languages. I really can't imagine writing code without hashmaps anymore. Did that ever get added, and in a convenient way that doesn't require declaring a new object each time?
0 replies
11h10m
You could use TDictionary. It has been around since 15 years.
0 replies
17h28m
There a post earlier regarding paint.net and people there mentioned irfanview.
4 replies
1d1h
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.
0 replies
1d1h
or just the batch mode ... very helpful and fast.
0 replies
12h36m
Win + Shift + S
0 replies
1d1h
for those increasingly rare times you want to print an image it's great too.
0 replies
11h33m
Directory Opus is a little faster:
CTRL-P pastes anything (image, text; not sure what else) in clipboard to a file in current directory
3 replies
21h36m
No one else misses Picasa?
1 replies
20h14m
Sometimes, but the differences in performance between the two were quite vast if I recall correctly.
0 replies
17h8m
I recall the same but the Picasa user experience has not been surpassed.
0 replies
16h59m
I recall it being horrifically slow, and uninstalled shortly after.
3 replies
23h41m
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.
2 replies
23h36m
I don't know for sure, but C++ is always a good guess with that kind of software.
1 replies
22h46m
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).
0 replies
21h17m
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.
2 replies
23h46m
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.
0 replies
17h47m
Good to hear your smug, self-satisfaction is keeping you warm, but anyone who thinks this is comparable to the default image viewer in Windows (even windows 30+ years after IrfanView) is out of sync.
0 replies
23h4m
Windows is still shitty. Same way, I've been on Linux for more than a decade already. Windows at work still hugely sucks.
2 replies
17h14m
My dad introduced me to it after he started using it when it came out in 1996. It’s great, quick image editing. My only gripe with it is that cropping is unnecessarily convoluted…
1 replies
16h36m
My only gripe with it is that cropping is unnecessarily convoluted…
What are you talking about? Make a rectangular selection on the image (click and drag across the image), then CTRL+Y. Couldn't be easier.
0 replies
7h33m
That shortcut is permanently burned into my muscle memory. I still instinctively hit Cmd + Y in Preview.app when meaning to crop.
2 replies
22h55m
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)
1 replies
22h46m
Jajce, not Jacje. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jajce
0 replies
5h25m
I've been there. It's a lovely little city and the river through the centre has some large and very impressive waterfalls, right in the middle of the city.
There's also a small church, underground, which was carved from solid rock rather than built. It's amazing.
https://visitbih.ba/en/catacombs-the-mystical-site-built-600...
2 replies
1d
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.
0 replies
20h4m
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.
0 replies
23h12m
Same, using it since 1998 (I was 9, 35 now).
Any windows PC I use doesn't feel right without the irfanview logo somewhere.
1 replies
1d2h
i use it to see .sid images...never found any other way to open those
0 replies
20h46m
Is QGIS too bulky?
1 replies
1d1h
One of those things you had to install on a new windows system.
0 replies
1d
Still do
1 replies
8h29m
I personally like "FSViewer" way more. It's customizable, portable and free. It was my favorite software, which was replaced by "XYPlorer", which is a fileExplorer alternative.
FSViewer link: https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm XYPlorer link: https://www.xyplorer.com/
0 replies
6h14m
I tried the Irfan view but I am just more comfortable with FSViewer.
1 replies
1d4h
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.)
0 replies
11h5m
There's a snap image of Foobar2000 for Linux which works very well :) My #1 music player.
1 replies
23h34m
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.
0 replies
22h24m
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.
1 replies
22h24m
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.
0 replies
8h45m
TBF current photo viewer for Win11 is decent, and cover the basics pretty well.
I reinstalled IrfanView from sheer nostalgia, and while it's still a good program, it doesn't handle pinch/zoom gestures as well as the default app. Same for editing, where IV has more features, yet core stuff like handwriting smoothing isn't as good.
The biggest difference between "these days" and now is IMHO the wide availability of other tools to do more advanced stuff. For instance I remember batch processing features and export features in IV that I used a lot, but nowadays I'd do it in Imagemagick or GIMP.
There is less need for a swiss army knife when the specialized tools are right there any time you need them.
1 replies
1d1h
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.
0 replies
11h20m
It's exactly the same for me. I've been using MacOS for 15 years, and just pressing the spacebar to see an image is a huge relief. I never had to install a simple image viewer on macOS. And if I did, xnView would also work, which I had installed on Windows before.
1 replies
1d1h
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.
0 replies
21h41m
ImageJ has roots (NIH Image) that predate Photoshop.
1 replies
1d
I wish I had corporate credit card... I could get myself copy for work...
0 replies
16h18m
I paid for a license because Irfanview is an excellent program I use every day. I also happen to use it at work, too.
1 replies
23h59m
I wish this program was either open source, or had a plugin API.
0 replies
22h33m
I think it must have some plugin API as it has plenty of plugins, but it seems for details you need to contact developer.
1 replies
19h41m
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...
0 replies
18h9m
Fastone Capture is my goto for this. Does everything including drawing etc. Excellent software.
1 replies
22h34m
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)
0 replies
3h24m
I like that you can simply start a text file or files, and close the program, it will save the session without any exit dialogs.
0 replies
8h20m
Always have to install Quicklook on my windows machines, too used to it on Mac
0 replies
15h27m
i’ve been using irfanview since i was in grade 4? and it’s one of the first things i install on every laptop i’ve owned ever since.
0 replies
8h53m
If somebody searching a good native Mac alternative I strongly recommend this fast open source image viewer (ignore the simple web page, software is great!):
Phoenix Slides
It replaced the (abandoneware) Xee3 on my system.
0 replies
17h44m
There is also JPEG View which is really fast and simple image viewer for windows https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview (fork of unmaintained https://sourceforge.net/projects/jpegview/) and another one vjpeg http://stereopsis.com/vjpeg/
These are both small and fast image viewers, specially noticeable on very large images.
We need a list/directory of fast tools like these, specially now when every tool is bloated by default.
0 replies
1d
FastStone gang forever
0 replies
8h14m
Lest Mac users miss out on the nostalgia trip the Windows users are enjoying in this thread: Remember GraphicConverter? It's still around and actively developed. 32 years old!
0 replies
23h40m
Still use it. It’s faster to open and move through photos than the windows built in one.
0 replies
1d1h
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?).
0 replies
18h5m
I guess anyone who has used windows would have come across irfanview one way or another
0 replies
1d
Still the best!
0 replies
22h20m
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.
0 replies
19h22m
I still use IrfanView to this day, all the way back since mid 90'ies. It's a fantastic piece of software with a great legacy and I wouldn't trade it for any modern photo software. So snappy and functional, works like a charm. With the plugins added to it you can open literally any image.
0 replies
20h9m
I think I used it from 1997 till 2001, all years I owned a windows pc. And until 2005 at windows pc at work.
0 replies
18h42m
Also my daily driver for any bitmap-related operations. One little thing that became my muscle memory over the years is using it to view/edit/crop latest clipboard entry, most often screenshots, through simple hotkey (olden AutoHotkey) launcher with `/clippaste` command line parameter.
; open / view current clipboard in irfanView
; win alt i
#!i::run,path\to\IrfanView\i_view32.exe /clippaste
0 replies
19h40m
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.
0 replies
8h14m
Some 15 years ago I wanted to contribute/fix bugs and asked the author if the sources are available. He answered yes, for $10000. Screw that guy, I wrote my own image viewer )
0 replies
15h10m
I've used irfanview for more than 15 years now. Mostly for looking at pictures. It's plenty fast.
Doesn't work super well with multimonitor and should just ignore non-image files though imho
0 replies
17h21m
Was there a special reason this was posted today? Irfanview has been around forever.
0 replies
23h53m
6MB feels so refreshing.
0 replies
7h52m
Tried to get into it many times but just couldn't and finally found XnView and it was awesome. Sadly after switching to mac it was no longer available and later on Qt version wasn't that good
0 replies
23h35m
Dear Irfan!
Thank you very much.
From myself (1995-...) and my father (1995-2003).
0 replies
20h7m
this is the sumatra pdf of images
0 replies
5h9m
I love IrfanView, have been using it since I started using Total Commander back in ... 2003? Have donated/purchased a licence several times for both projects.
0 replies
5h9m
Been using irfanview since i heard about it in college from a classmate. I've included it in a number of image processing pipelines when i just need a few simple modifications to a lot of images. Its faster than a number of libraries that do thr same thing
0 replies
1d
Was a nice tool, but boy I hated seeing it's weird icon on every image files (before images had icon previews)
0 replies
2h0m
Irfanview. For the people
0 replies
14h42m
Great program, I use it to this day.
0 replies
20h40m
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.
0 replies
19h6m
IrfanView configured to open with space bar in WindowsCommander (as TotalCommander was called at the time) for a quick view. Name a more iconic duo.
0 replies
21h34m
I've found nomacs to be a good alternative:
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.
0 replies
1d
For quick cropping, rescaling, and batch processing, this is the BEST image editor on Linux (using Wine of course).
0 replies
18h58m
Still in https://ninite.com/ selection view
0 replies
7h28m
Related question: Is there any way to view HEIC files on Windows without installing the extensions from the Microsoft Store, or dodgy proprietary software? Even Irfanview requires the former.
0 replies
18h0m
Yes, we've heard of it. It's been around for 25+ years.
0 replies
6h42m
Uh, another noob one discovering an age-old, well known tool. Now post the link to its Wikipedia article!
0 replies
18h44m
I very much prefer FastStone image viewer
0 replies
5h55m
This is all-time favourite, indispensable graphics utility! I've used it for years and it's never let me down! If Irfan is reading this, can we pleeeeease have a native Linux version?
0 replies
11h7m
Great software but it isn’t color correct and has issues with embedded color profiles and conversion between color spaces.
0 replies
4h4m
ACDSee old versions (2.6.1?) would preload the next image in memory while scrolling through a folder, making it extremely useful in the age of hard drives. It became bloated, but the only reasons to switch were for newer image formats, and sometimes .gifs would crash it.
FastStone Image Viewer is the performant, slick image viewer I use now.
IrfanView has some rough defaults like if you scroll to the end of a folder, a window pops up that you have to click away before you can scroll back. I use it all the time for simple editing, not viewing.
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".
"...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.
Because the chances of Google closing accounts or losing data is much lower than a consumer's usb drive being damaged or lost.
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.
…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.
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.
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.
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'être.
Overall it's these photos and videos that are my strongest motivation for the paranoia-level backup setup I have.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
More importantly, not everybody wants to be entirely self reliant. They're ok with small task delegation.
Sometimes you don’t realize things about yourself until someone else puts it into words. Thank you, internet stranger
It's not.
Alternative?
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?
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).
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.
DidectoryOpus is even better, but it's expensive.
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.
I'm pretty sure it had batch processing capabilities before Photoshop.
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.
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.
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.
FastPictureViewer
Most people look at images via browser these days.
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?
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.
Someone trying to understand why _most_ comments reflect a certain behaviour is, by definition, someone who cares about understanding what "what most people do".
>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.
"...via browser these days."
'Most people' = LCD/lowest common denominator.
If one doesn't mind grovelling around at the bottom then that's fine.
This seems unnecessarily harsh.
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 the fallout on social media. Now we have kids taking such 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.)
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.
To add to that, for me mplayer was clutch for a long time, nowadays I opt for VLC though.
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.
That sounds bad. Is it on any old shareware sites ?
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.
Yep, funny enough I have a Macbook for work (company laptop) and I also stumbled upon Maccy. You're right in that it's not Ditto but it's quite good and I'm overall happy using it.
Right, foobar2000 is great isn't it?
I prefer JPEGView on Windows. What do you think is the best alternative for Linux?
Just saw this mentioned above, might as well ask here: why? It looks to only support a small fraction of features.
It opens instantly. It shows just the image by default (no toolbars, scroll bars, menu bars, or status bars). I can disable linear interpolation with F3 and show width/height of an image with F2. It zooms with the scroll wheel, pans by dragging, and it lets me go to the next, previous, first, and last image of a directory instantly, and doing that won't resize the window.
I suppose the key difference is that some people want just a read-only image viewer that traverses a directory, while others want a photo viewer, or image metadata editor, or photo management system. I haven't used Windows' default image viewer in ages, but I recall when I used it, rotating an image actually rotated the image, as in it changed the orientation header of JPEG files and rewrote the files. This is why I have trust issues. If even image viewers can't just view the image, how can I possibly trust the software that drives cars, flies planes, or does the banking?
Not really the difference in context of IrfanView which is also just an image viewer.
I tried JpegView, but it’s lacking several features I use in IV, and stuff I commonly do in IV is harder to do, so for me IV is a clear and easy winner. Performance is a little better, but not in a way I’d actually care about (mainly superfast skipping through images is slightly faster)
It's faster to load images
I have not found a faster image viewer on Linux than 'feh'. And I've tried a lot.
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.
Windows has shipped with an image previewer since Windows ME. You can see it in this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_ima...
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…
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.
Windows 98 did have an image viewer but it was an optional component. It was called Imaging for Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_for_Windows
There was also a Microsoft Photo Editor that was bundled with Office 97: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor
The built in photos app is quite good now, although it can't open apple heif files yet.
It should with the Microsoft HEIF plugin: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pmmsr1cgpwg?hl=en-us
Doesn’t work with “live” photos.
What are live photos?
Thanks! Good to know.
I use JPEGView nowadays https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview
Does it have feature parity? Just from the list it looks like it only supports a small fraction of what Irfan view does.
No that many. It supports the most important ones though, and it is the fastest
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
This is amazing! Thank you for sharing it.
For me it’s because I haven’t run Windows for ages
I've run it via wine for probably close to twenty years now.
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.
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.
Because many HN readers have moved on from Windows.
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.
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.