IrfanView

This is without a doubt one of the best FreeWare programs. It started as a Windows 9x graphics viewer. It can handle almost any graphic format. But now it does much more. You could use it to convert images to different formats. It includes some simple graphics editing features such as crop and resize. Here is a screenshot of the main window. (Click on the thumbnails to see the full screenshot, then click your back button to get back here).

Here is a screenshot with the file menu displayed.

While the only way to see what all IrfanView can do is play with it, we'll now look at a couple of things you might want to check out.

Thumbnails and HTML

First is the Thumbnails menu choice. With this you can look at all the images in a directory in a reduced thumbnail size. Here is the thumbnail window for a small directory. Clicking on one of these thumbnails would bring up the original image.

All of the thumbnails on this page were created using the save as individual images. But even more fun, if you go to the Options menu you can choose to write out selected thumbnails to a html web page.

Here is the link to the page created selecting all three of the thumbnails in the screens above. This is a very easy way to put images up on the web. With only a little bit of editing the page could be modified to fit your own webpage style.

AutoRun CD SlideShow

Another thing that could be done with IrfanView is to create autorun CD slideshows. This is fairly easy to do if you have a CD writer. You just need to have all your images ready, a copy of IrfanView (the i_view32.exe file), and two text files described below (and an icon for the CD if you so desire).

The first file is a text file list of the images you want to have in the slideshow. Each image name should be on a single line. For example:

a01.jpg
a02.jpg
a03.jpg
a04.jpg

The other file is the "autorun.inf" file. If the file above is called myshow.txt (and the icon you found is called camera2.ico) then your autorun.inf file should look like:

Save this as in text format with the name "autorun.inf" and then write all the files to a CD (I keep all the files for a CD in one directory). Then the slideshow will automatically play when the CD is put into any (Win9x) computer that has CD autorun turned on.

This is only a small fraction of what IrfanView will do. You should download it and see what all it can do for you.

Go to the IrfanView homepage by clicking the image below.

 

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