IrfanView is a freeware image viewer for Microsoft Windows that can view, edit, and convert image files and play video/audio formats. It does not have extensive image creation and painting capabilities like Adobe Photoshop or GNU's GIMP. Rather, IrfanView is designed to be a lightweight viewer/player which is noted for its speed, ease of use, and ability to handle a wide variety of graphic file formats.
- The program is compact: the latest version is less than 1200 kB in size, although several megabytes of plugins are available to support numerous other file formats and features. In addition to extensive viewing capabilities and file conversion options, IrfanView can also create screensavers and slide shows from collections of images with optional accompanying mp3 audio. These screensavers and slide shows can be created as “stand-alone” executables that will run on computers which do not have IrfanView installed.
- Irfanview can be downloaded directly to a U3 compatible device.
- IrfanView can also be used to create icons by converting common graphic files into .ico format. It also supports Adobe-compatible 8bf image processing filters, including many freely downloadable ones, though its ability to apply them to portions of an image is limited compared to full-scale image editors.
- The program has built-in TWAIN support for retrieving images from scanners; it also has extended support for taking screenshots.
- It can crop, resize, and rotate images. Images can be adjusted by modifying the brightness, contrast, tint, Gamma level, and so forth, and by converting them between formats. Many of these changes can be applied to multiple images in one operation, using batch processing.
- IrfanView can direct the active image to open in an external graphics editor (Adobe PhotoShop, for example), if the user has one installed.
- In English by default, the program is internationalized in over twenty languages.
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