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| 4th March 2003 | IRFANVIEW |
Brian Grainger |
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Introduction The Daily Telegraph, in their weekly 'Connected' column, have been running a series on digital photography and touched on the subject of PC programs to view the results. They mentioned two, ACDSee and IrfanView. The first I had already heard of, although I had not investigated. It is obviously a good program, but it is shareware. You can use it for free but have to keep accessing the web site to extend it for each 30 day period. I had not heard of IrfanView before so I decided to investigate. Turns out it comes into the category of what I term FAB software - (well my formative years were in the 60s!). FAB stands for Free and Acceptably Behaved. By 'Acceptably Behaved' I mean that it does not go installing or changing stuff in the Windows folders and it does not make changes to the registry without asking. IrfanView is written by Irfan Skiljan, who appears to hail from Austria, and from the change log one can see it has been well maintained - another reason to trust it. It comes as a self installing package or, if you wish, you can install it yourself. I chose the latter. The basic software is less than 1MB but if you want the full works it comes with a series of plugins, which add another 3.5MB. Downloads The IrfanView web site contains lots of information about the program and the download pages can be found at: IrfanView Basic: http://www.irfanview.com/download_sites.htm These pages direct the user to Tucows as the primary download source, although alternative sites are given. I found some links at the Austrian Goodie Domain Service enabled me to get some zip files. IrfanView Basic zip: http://irfanview.tuwien.ac.at/iview380.zip Installation Installation of these zip files is simple. Extract iview380.zip to a directory of choice, e.g. c:\Program Files\IrfanView3.8 A subdirectory of the directory of choice will be Plugins Extract all_plugins.zip to this Plugins directory overwriting any matches it finds already. The Basics The basic program comes with a viewer for the more usual picture formats, along with the capability to do some effects editing. IrfanView should not be regarded as a full blown editor like Paint Shop Pro. It is more in line with the capability of Microsoft's Photo Editor. IrfanView also makes a good multimedia tool because it will play back common sound and video formats, including MPG, AVI and MOV. The basic program also come with the plugin to create self running slideshows from your pictures. The final plugin to be included with the package is one which gives the ability to extract individual frames from an MPG file. Plugins The plugins add the capability to view the more esoteric file formats as well as provide some other useful facilities. You can play Macromedia Flash files, the first non-Macromedia program to be able to do this apparently. Another plugin gives IrfanView its own media player. This allows it to play audio CDs as well as the more usual formats. I found that it would play things that Media Player on my Windows 98 with Y2K service pack would not play. Some of the formats it will play rely on the base programs being available. For example, it will play real audio files provided the Real Player is installed. I guess this gets round some copyright problem. Another plugin give MP3 playback facility. Finally, if you have Nero burning software a plugin will allow a slideshow to be burned to CD. Functions There are some nice touches with IrfanView. The Thumbnails option opens up a separate Explorer like window with Folders on one pane and thumbnails of any image files in the selected folder on the other. You can open a picture by double clicking its thumb but you can also select a range of thumbs and then create a slideshow or contact sheet. The slideshow function allows you to select and sort pictures for the show and then choose whether they are displayed randomly or in order. You can define the wait time between images or have image change controlled by mouse/keyboard. You can also put movies into a slideshow although transition is tricky because you cannot set a transition time for an individual item in the slideshow. The time is the same for all transitions in the show. IrfanView can also be a tool to view files in Hex format. You can also view ASCII files, (as images) - which just about completes the multitude of formats that IrfanView will cope with. As with any file viewer you can convert from one format to another. IrfanView adds a batch converter if you have many file to do at once. Finally, IrfanView can be used as a basic program to control your scanner, if it is a TWAIN device. It will acquire images, scan to print and also deal with multiple pages by automatically naming each page in an increment format or creating multi-page TIF files. Editing Options The usual cut, paste and crop options are available. In addition a cut-leave option will effectively remove all but the selection from the image but leave the image the same size. A final editing option is the capability to add text. This is something that Microsoft Photo Editor will not do, which I find extremely irritating. In the past I have transferred from Photo Editor to Kodak Imaging, simply to add text. Now I can do it with one package. Image Effects First of all we have the usual flip and rotates. One of the plugins allows this to be done in a lossless way on JPEG files. The Resize option is also fairly standard. You can mess with the colours by increasing or decreasing depth, swapping or enhancing colours, going negative or converting to greyscale. Sharpen and red eye reduction facilities are available for your photos. There are a few fancy effects such as creating a panoramic image, oil paint and pixellation but there is not the range that is available with Photo Editor. Options The list of options that do not fit into the above categories include screen capture, sending piccies as e-mail, (via a plugin), and setting an image as wallpaper. It is also possible to set file associations so, for example, clicking on a .jpg file will automatically load it into IrfanView. I personally do not like this idea too much as most times I simply want to view the image rather than play with it. The default association of Internet Explorer is thus ideal. What is missing - bugs? I do know that IrfanView does not contain everything. A colleague who uses ACDSee would find the lack of database capability a problem. He likes to give his photos meaningful titles so uses the database facility of ACDSee. As I said above, some of the effects of Photo Editor are missing. Also, while IrfanView will allow text to be appended to files, Kodak Imaging allows basic drawing shapes to be appended as well. The program has been well maintained but some bugs remain. The only ones I found related to the Help File system. It occasionally left an orphan help window which could not be closed until the Help File was closed. The Help File window did not recognise correctly the position of the top right of the viewing area. This meant the right edge of my help window was hidden by my Office toolbar, which resides on the right edge of my screen. Nevertheless, these bugs would not stop me from using the program. They are very minor compared to the benefits obtained from the use of IrfanView. Conclusion As you can see, IrfanView contains most of the standard features of an image viewer program but builds on it with facilities for sound and movie files. The basic program is really small by today's standards and, if space is limited, you can choose which plugins to use. Together with the facts that IrfanView does not mess with your Windows set up and that it is free makes IrfanView unbeatable FAB software in my view. Within the last week Irfanview has been updated to version 3.90. I have not tried out the new version yet. The change log suggests many changes including improvements to the creation of thumbnails, contact sheets and slideshows as well as an improved print dialog.
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