IrfanView Review

Detailed Reviews

IrfanView is an image viewer program created and developed by Irfan Skiljan, a software developer based in Austria. The goal of the developer is to give both beginners and professionals a simple yet powerful image viewer program that they can rely on, without having to pay the expensive license for it. The software has been known as the first Windows image viewer program that is used worldwide, which offers support for multiple animated GIF, multi-page TIF, and multiple ICO.

Support For Various Image Formats

The problem with many image viewer programs that are available online is that they often don’t support a wide-range of image formats. Usually, these programs only support popular formats that people are using, such as JPG, PNG, GIF, and BMP. Other than that, these programs cannot read the image files, let alone edit them. IrfanView is a robust image viewer software that has been around for a long time, and it supports a wide range of image formats. Not only that, you can also edit your images, or convert them into other formats. The image formats supported by this software include JPG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, ICO, IMG, PSD, SWF, TTF, WBMP, and more. It also supports video and audio formats such as AVI, MP3, OGG, WAV, MOV, MPG, MKV, and more.

Some Useful Image Editing Features

This image viewer program has various editing functionalities that allow you to edit certain image formats, just like professional image editing software. However, the editing features are still somewhat limited to certain file types, which is still good if you just want to create a few changes in your images without having to pay for the expensive license of a professional image manipulation software like Photoshop. The image editing features include paint option, Adobe Photoshop filter support, watermark, change color depth, and effects.

Various Additional Plugins

While the main software is already powerful enough for you to view, edit, and convert your images, there are additional features that you can add to the software by adding various plugins to it. IrfanView supports additional plugin installation to enhance the functionalities of the software, and thus, making the software even more useful for your image editing needs. Some plugins are made by the third-party developers, while some others are made by the software developer. Each plugin has their own functionalities which you can use according to your needs. For instance, CADImage is a plugin that allows you to read SVG, DXF, DWG, CGM, and HPGL files.

Toolbar Skins

This software has been around for years, even when Windows was still a quite new operating system. However, it didn’t receive much updates in its user interface throughout the years. As a result, the user interface still seems to be old and outdated. Fortunately, there are toolbar skins that you can use to change the appearance of the toolbar. There are various skins to choose, with different designers for each skin, which can help you to make the software look more modern. The toolbar skins change the toolbar icons in the software, allowing you to have a more modern user interface for this powerful image viewer program.

Support For Batch Image Conversion

Not only IrfanView is good for reading and editing image files, it is also good for converting your image files into other formats. You can convert one image to another format with this software in just a few clicks. The process is done seamlessly, and there are no complicated steps to do this. Additionally, it also supports batch converting, which allows you to convert multiple image files at the same time. In this way, you can save your time in converting your favorite images, and you don’t need to do the converting process one by one manually.

Conclusion

When it comes to providing the best image viewing experience, IrfanView offers you something that other free image viewer programs couldn’t. It is a robust image viewing, editing, and converting tool that you can get, with the functionalities that are on par with some good professional image viewers out there. You can view almost all image formats using this software, and you can also give more features to the software by installing additional plugins. Not only that, it can also read audio and video files as well, making this software not only good for image viewing, but also making it handy for multimedia playing.