Irfanview Review
Overview
IrfanView is an image/multimedia viewer and player. It can display virtually any format of image and play all of the common sound files and movies that are out there. It is extremely fast at loading things up, and doesn't require that much space on the hard drive.
Interface
The interface is great. There is a a large black area right beneath the button-bar where all of the images and such are displayed. Once an image is displayed, you can make minor touchups to it by using the various menu options. By rotating the scroll wheel, you can go to the next or the previous picture in the folder that you are in.
When you play a sound file, there is just a simple area where you can play, pause, and stop the sound file. When you play mp3s, you have a few more options, and you get a volume control.
Movie playing works well, though some formats are not supported. If you want, you can even extract all of the frames out of video. This makes it easy to capture screenshots.
Features
This is very full featured for a freeware program, and there is a lot that you can do with it.
You can do the normal touchups, like rotating, adjusting the brightness and contrast, and removing red-eye. A notice though, removing red-eye uses a square tool and is not as easy to as it is in other programs. There are also quite a few filtering options, such as negative, emboss, and greyscale.
There is a slideshow program which lets you make photo slideshows and screensavers. The creator for it very easy to use. You can even set it to show the EXIF data in the corner of the screen as it is playing!
The program also has a batch processor, which enables you to quickly convert files, apply a group of filters, and many more things.
Included with the program is a thumbnail viewer, which enables you to view large groups of thumbnails very quickly.
Conclusion
This program is exceptional. I install it on all of the systems that I work on. Download it here.