Something I've installed on every computer I've owned is an incredibly compact, "light" yet amazingly versatil image viewer called Irfanview.

This program was developed by a student, Markham Bey, who has long since gone on to bigger things, but maintains this, his most popular program.

Link; http://www.irfanview.ca/

I set it up as my default image viewer because it's so damn fast. I shudder when I see people with I.E. or Photoshop as their default; talk about overkill!

And as tiny and super-fast as it is, it can do all the basic editing, incuding batch processing (converting a bunch of bmp's to jpg's, etc), text overlays, cropping, etc etc.

I even use it at work; if you just want to make sure a buch of renders turned out the way you expected, nothing lets you breeze through them faster.

... I hope this doesn't look like an advertisement

I just have always thought this is by far and away the best way to quickly view images.

StefanIsMe (imported) wrote: Wed Jul 07, 2010 6:54 pm Something I've installed on every computer I've owned is an incredibly compact, "light" yet amazingly versatil image viewer called Irfanview.

I sometimes use Irfanview but most of the time I use ACDSee 2.42 which I registered in 1995.

I prefer ACDSee because of better designed shortcuts, but it bothers me all the features added to make it more than a viewer.

asphalt-cowboy (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 08, 2010 4:32 am I prefer ACDSee because of better designed shortcuts, but it bothers me all the features added to make it more than a viewer.

Which version do you use? I tried 3.0 and 3.1 and did not like them. Two-point-four-two has almost everything I want. If it had these things it would be perfect: conversion to png and the ability to browse images that it has found with the search function. Infraview has those capabilities which is why I sometimes use it.

Now I have version 8.0, but I absolutely agree that the 2.x versions were the best. That was before he became photo editor, audio and video player, functions for which I use other programs. Unfortunately I can not remember why I don't kept version 2.x. Maybe the changes coming gradually, the new features were only slightly more disturbing than in the previous version.

But I remember why I preferred ACDSee before I discovered his shortcuts. Unlike Infranview, ACDSee displays vectorial images perfectly (*.wmf), and I quite often work with this files (logos, cliparts).

My only gripe with IrfanView is that if you turn color management on, it oversaturates the images. Turned off, it looks more like it should in other apps.

Paolo wrote: Sat Jul 10, 2010 7:09 am My only gripe with IrfanView is that if you turn color management on, it oversaturates the images. Turned off, it looks more like it should in other apps.

Why do so many posts end with that thing about 2012? I don't get it?

Sensenbender, that '2012' thing is Paolo's "Signature"; it is a bit of text that is pinned to the end of any post he makes.

You can create your own sigature in your profile. Many here use them.

And I have to mention; still looking forward to the next part of your Boys Club story!

curious_guy (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 08, 2010 3:18 am I sometimes use Irfanview but most of the time I use ACDSee 2.42 which I registered in 1995.

I got it wrong. The program I sometime use is XnView and not Irfanview. I think I tried Irfanview and did not like it as much as XnView.

http://www.xnview.com

I have also been using Irfanview for years. It is a great program with a lot of useful editing/tweaking options (especially after installing the optional plug-ins download). More importantly Irfanview is LIGHTWEIGHT (ie: It starts up and operates very fast).

Nothing I hate worse than heavy/bloated program which requires 10+ seconds of disk-thrashing just to view a picture (Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks, etc)

I also use the built-in "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" on WinXP computers that don't have Irfanview.