For years this was me general go to program for image viewing and basic manipulation and again it is a great program for what it does. Firstly I will say, to get the most out of it you need to install the plugins. Luckily this can be done simply by downloading all the plugins in one file and running it. This adds a lot of functionality to the program although I must admit, after using it for so many years I forget which functions are provided by the program and which by the plugins, it’s that seamless.
So what can this free image viewer actually do, well it supports over 80 file types videos as well as images. You can do all the basic editing you require, cropping, resizing, straightening etc. There are even some effects Blur, Emboss, Oil Painting etc. On the side tool bar (if you can’t see this press F12 and it should appear, if it doesn’t are you sure you installed the plugins?) you will find stuff like the Clone Tool, Shape tool and colour correction.
If all that isn’t enough Irfanview has a great thumbnail browser through which you can access a whole extra set of functions. In this you can do all the basic things like copying and moving images and you can also do some rather nifty things like making basic web pages (thumbs linked to full sized images), save selected thumbnails as individual images as individual images or even as contact sheets. The are also functions for combining images as a panorama, as a single image or running a slideshow.
This a a great multi functional program, a bit of a Swiss Army Knife for images (yes it can read/play video files as well but which it can actually do with them is very limited).
Please only download this program via it’s official website. It is only available for the windows operating syste. http://www.irfanview.com/
