Back when i used Windows, IrfanView was my go-to image viewer, downloaded along with SumatraPDF via ninite.com. There's something similar in the repositories in Software Manager on Linux Mint, and Pix is fuller-featured, but like Foobar2000 for music, I still miss IrfanView from time to time, probably because of muscle memory and being more impressionable back then. (There's almostt certainly a way to get these Windows programs running on LMDE, I just don't care enough to mess with it.)
In Windows it's still faster than anything else if you've copied an image to clipboard to open irfanview -> paste -> save, or to do a quick crop or whatever.
The most important part of Winamp is the global keyboard shortcuts you can set up. I have been using wasd controls for my games and my player since forever. Well, since I found the global keyboard shortcuts in winamp...
wasd for games, ctrl+shift+qewasd for play/pause/forward/backward/next/prev and so on. Don't need to switch window, don't need to move hand away from wasd. Can't live without it now even though I don't have so much playtime any more. Works just as well in any other environment.
I am often disappointed by the lack of shortcuts and features in VLC compared to Potplayer.
Just some of the few keyboard shortcuts in Potplayer I use regularly:
"<" and ">" to shift the subtitle sync by half a secondd
"shift-<" and "shift->" to adjust the audio sync by half a second
"[" and "]" to set an A-B repeat of that awesome scene or soundtrack
"D" and "F" to move by a single frame forward and backward
there's also shortcut to decrease and increase things like saturation and brightness by 1% or shortcuts for 0.5x, 1x, 2x size.
I have to make do with SMplayer in Linux which is awesome but you have to setup the keyboard shortcuts manually yourself.
Windows was good for shareware developers because people had to buy utilities to like Irfanview to basically replace all the junk the OS shipped with. I eventually drop-kicked the whole OS and now life is good.
It's exactly the same for me. I've been using MacOS for 15 years, and just pressing the spacebar to see an image is a huge relief. I never had to install a simple image viewer on macOS. And if I did, xnView would also work, which I had installed on Windows before.
Along with ImageJ, that is open-source and has found use by researchers among many different disciplines, they're great examples of longstanding projects done right.
Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best image viewer in town, on Windows at least
1. Windows 11 now ships with quite a decent and powerful image viewer/editor that covers most average users' use cases, therefore lowering the demand from people to go out of their way to find alternatives, like in the Windows XP days, which is a good thing (less likely to go download malware from the first Google result of "image viewer for Windows XP").
2. PC usage behavior has changed a lot since then. Many people don't even have PCs at home anymore, and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or on their phone or some external NAS that comes with it's own browser viewer app, instead of hoarding them all on their home PC hard drive, further lowering the need to seek out dedicated image viewers to manage giant offline collections of digital camera pics(I mean I still do, but I'm a minority nowadays).
These two factors combined meant the death of the third party PC image viewer app. Yeah, Irfan might be "the best", but the need for the best in this sector has declined significantly, and most users are now fine with "good enough".
The "enshittification" of computing. The Windows 11 default Photo Viewer has probably 20% of the features of IrfanView - and the problem is that normal users don't know a better tool exists for free if they need those extra features. As the resident techie in my house I get asked by people to do simple things like overlay text in a certain style or print a photo with a particular resolution or print multiple photos etc. and these tasks are just harder or impossible with the default tools
I'm guessing even if they knew the tool existed they would still rather ask you to do it. Not everyone wants to understand computers or download programs
Does the Windows 11 photo viewer still have that gross flickering when changing images and absurdly slow startup that the Windows 10 photo viewer added when they replaced the old Vista/7 viewer, which had none of these issues?
What flickering do you have? I don't see any. As for startup time, I dunno, seems to open in less than half a second for me, though on a relatively high end laptop. On a 10 year old machine it might suffer.
I rarely use Windows these days, but IrfanView feels lightning fast compared to the built-in Photos app or whatever they call it. I started using IV I think on Win 98 and it's still as snappy and reliable as it always has been.
I haven't used the latest Windows viewer because I'm no longer prepared to upgrade to the latest versions of Windows, but the old version was a dog of a program compared to IrfanView, it was slow, couldn't display many formats and would misbehave if the image files were damaged.
And yes, at times it flickers and or images can tear.
The recent photo viewer is great. I never felt the need to install Irfan anymore just to view photos since .. a long time now.
I mean why would I? If all I need is viewing a couple of photos every now and then, cropping and rotating one or two and drawing some circles on them to highlight something in a screenshot and Windows already does that then why bother with Irfan other than habit and nostalgia.
"...and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or on their phone,"
...until Google closes their account or their data becomes otherwise inaccessible!
It horrifies me that so many people are so willing to commit their valuable data to the cloud just because of convenience.
Leaving aside Big Tech's spying on users and selling away their privacy, users who commit data to the cloud put its integrity and ultimately its long-term survival in the hands of third parties who couldn't give a damn whether it was lost or destroyed—their only interest is the income it generates.
That the shift to the cloud has been so complete is very disconcerting. It never ceases to amaze me that so many are so trusting of others that they'd actually hand over their valuable data for safekeeping to the likes of Google, et al. I've used the internet since before the inception of the Web and I've never once committed any of my data to the cloud (but if I had to then it'd be an encrypted backup).
Re IrfanView, I used to use Ed Hamrick's rather excellent image viewer VuePrint until I came across IrfanView about two decades ago. For numerous reasons IrfanView is the best viewer out there.
…that wasn’t the point? Keeping possessions safe is the responsibility of the possessor. If you keep them all in one place with no backups, you can lose them more easily.
And by the way, you don’t actually know the probability of a random person losing access to a Google account vs losing physical mediums, let alone how many of those cases were cases where their only photos were stored there. It’s obviously different from person to person, and maybe you can estimate that one is safer than the other in individual cases, but you can’t extrapolate that and say it applies in every person’s case. But the GP was referring to cases where it was implied the only copy was stored on the cloud.
Plus, it is convenient to sync photos directly from mobile to the cloud without the need to set up syncing software or do periodic transfer/backup from mobile to PC.
> It horrifies me that so many people are so willing to commit their valuable data to the cloud just because of convenience.
I used to get horrified too until I learned that average user doesn't care much about losing pictures. My wife has lost phone full of pics multiple times and she's upset for like few hours.
It's easy to obsess over the idea of any data loss, because the value of some data is quite high. But for most people in most circumstances losing their cloud hosted photos is probably not a big deal, and it's also probably far less likely than the users losing locally stored photos due to some mistake of their own.
You don't know what you've lost until it's something you want to re-live or remember.
I go back through photos and videos of my kids and it reminds me that I succeeded at something worthwhile and difficult for at least a period of my life. They had a blessed childhood.
Food or selfies and even holiday snaps mean little. But the kids... that's the raison d'être.
Overall it's these photos and videos that are my strongest motivation for the paranoia-level backup setup I have.
Wait a minute, if you don't have copies of data in the cloud, you have copies on HDDs and CDRWs? From experience I know that those fail within 10 years or so. Lot's of my data is already 20+ years in the cloud.
The built-in viewer in windows is fine. I can't really think of a feature that it doesn't have that I need. Could you say why irfanview gets your vote?
The batch image manipulation features it offers are pretty handy. Plus you can press L or R to rotate an image and it has lossless rotate options as well.
The speed, plugins ecosystem, many more formats supported out of the box, crop being faster and more intuitive, often good enough auto adjust.
Irfan for images and vlc for video is the name of the game for me (and total commander for file management, the efficiency compared to simpler stuff is still in wow territory).
It's also a paint tool (edit->show paint dialog), and does tricks like swapping channels or repeating the image as a grid of tiles, which are handy when programming something involving raster graphics or textures.
It's about speed mostly. And I got used to the shortcuts, ctrl+r to resize, 'i' to check image metadata. I don't really use any of the editing features (I use Paint.NET for edits).
In theory I don't need a dedicated image viewer but I like IrfanView so much that I even paid for it so I can have it on company's laptop.
Install it and you'll see within 5-10 minutes the next time you have go through a bunch of images, or do something to a bunch of images.
IrfanView likely still supports more formats, since it was earlier than any other tool.
This means any edge cases in file encoding that might not work, or render ideally likely has been solved there first.
It probably has some batch file conversion tricks in it too.
IrfanView also provided for free for a lot of years what was hard to get without paying. If it existed on mac I'd be all over it.
Ah, the windows viewer always wasn't that good.
And if I remember the big first improvement of it was copying a lot of IrfanView.
Since this post, I remembered another old friend that was excellent on windows, AcdSEE. Also worth looking into.
It made more sense to go through the effort to install IrfanView when there was no image previewer built into windows, in the days of Windows 95/98/ME/2000. Those only had MS Paint, and I think some versions only supported bmp files (no jpeg or gif). Windows XP had an ok image previewer.
IIRC the killer "feature" that gave these previewers traction (ACDSee, IrfanView etc.) was that you could just preview a bunch of images in a folder using your arrow keys. So you'd just load one and use arrow keys to see the other images in the same folder. With the built-in options, you'd have to double click images one by one (and close their windows one by one) which was a horrible UX compared to what these provided.
That’s the “Preview pane” in explorer. It only supports the file types you could preview in explorer, it only “opens” the file currently selected in Explorer, and didn’t let you zoom in or inspect the image in any way that I recall. It was a plain preview that was supported (in ME) by the integrations Explorer had with Internet Explorer, I believe. Often installing IrfanView let you preview more file types in Explorer, and you could open more than one, display them full screen, edit them, resize them, and more…
Agreed - I'm still using it everyday to view and do some minor editing (trimming and resizing pics). It, along with browsers, VLC, Putty, and SublimeText (and now also ObsidianMD) are the first things I will download to a new Windows PC.
Who cares what 'most people do'? Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"? Have you all forgotten that niche things exist?
>Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"?
It's not constantly, it's the answer to this question. Why are you getting your knickers in a twist?
In this case he gave the answer to the question of why Irfan view isn't popular anymore and the answer is because the majority of people have moved on.
It's not something he decided or that he can change, it's just the fact and he's reported it to you. The fact that you don't like the reality, is your own issue.
> Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense?
> Who cares what 'most people do'?
Someone trying to understand why _most_ comments reflect a certain behaviour is, by definition, someone who cares about understanding what "what most people do".
Niche things by definition are less popular. In my grandparent comment I was explaining why standalone image viewers are less popular. Looks like we agree.
We are now in an age where expected norms in society are such that the slightest criticism of anyone—even if justified—is taken as offensive by both the recipient and by onlookers.
Unfortunately, keeping mum and not saying anything just lets people off the hook, they no longer have to justify their actions either to themselves or anyone else. In fact, I'd argue that in recent years the trend has gotten so bad and out of hand that it's having a very noticeable negative impact on society.
Clearly, I'm older than you, when I was younger this comment would have hardly raised an eyebrow (right, I'm old enough to have noticed this societal change and the negative impact it's had).
When I was at school we were actively taught to ignore unwarranted critism, and even if it were justified to consider carefully what was actually said before responding. In fact, the old adage that 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' was drummed into us kids at a very early age (in infants school). Can you imagin teachers teaching that today? I'd reckon they'd likely be lynched.
Now, what's the situation nowadays when kids are no longer taught how to develop and strengthen their resilience? Well, one only has to look at the fallout on social media. Now we have kids taking such great offense at something someone has said to them and they're getting upset to such an extent that some even resort to suicide. (When I was a kid suicide was something that only adults with disturbed minds did—never kids or teenagers, it was unheard of. No doubt there were isolated instances but we kids never heard of them.)
I used to use irfranview for many years, but I rarely ever use Windows anymore. I recently started to use oculante [1] for image viewer because its cross os. Before that, I used imv on Linux and xee on macOS.
It opens instantly. It shows just the image by default (no toolbars, scroll bars, menu bars, or status bars). I can disable linear interpolation with F3 and show width/height of an image with F2. It zooms with the scroll wheel, pans by dragging, and it lets me go to the next, previous, first, and last image of a directory instantly, and doing that won't resize the window.
I suppose the key difference is that some people want just a read-only image viewer that traverses a directory, while others want a photo viewer, or image metadata editor, or photo management system. I haven't used Windows' default image viewer in ages, but I recall when I used it, rotating an image actually rotated the image, as in it changed the orientation header of JPEG files and rewrote the files. This is why I have trust issues. If even image viewers can't just view the image, how can I possibly trust the software that drives cars, flies planes, or does the banking?
Not really the difference in context of IrfanView which is also just an image viewer.
I tried JpegView, but it’s lacking several features I use in IV, and stuff I commonly do in IV is harder to do, so for me IV is a clear and easy winner. Performance is a little better, but not in a way I’d actually care about (mainly superfast skipping through images is slightly faster)
It does support batch rename, though. And generally I want to resize images while looking at them, and not go elsewhere for that. But only when I want it to, no automation.
it can be found here, and a few other places as well, but unfortunately the source code was never shared. Though it was such an amazing, blazing fast and bloatfree app, such a shame the code was never shared, and now it seems lost, unless the author is around somewhere?
Of the three, ditto easily takes no. 1 spot. Must’ve saved me weeks of juggling windows and trying to remember where stuff was at this point. It’s a superpower, a true game changer if I ever saw one.
Maccy on macOS is about half as good which is still an absolute unit of a tool. Couldn’t use a Mac without it.
Yep, funny enough I have a Macbook for work (company laptop) and I also stumbled upon Maccy. You're right in that it's not Ditto but it's quite good and I'm overall happy using it.
> The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used.[4][5][6][7] The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables[a] or slab, before the term byte became common.
> The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte, as 2 to the power of 8 is 256.[8] The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte.[9] Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively.
The Windows standard file open dialog allows you to paste a http(s) link in, which will be downloaded and opened from the Temp folder. This works with all applications that use that dialog.
IrfanView is one of my "must to have apps", going back to Win 98.
For simple image editing (resizing, cropping etc) and batch processing, it's though to beat.
Now I mostly work on macOS, and miss it. I guess XnView is close enough.
I love(d) infan view, but just got used to (a portable version of) Xnview. I keep going back to irfan, but again - as much as it is an amazing piece of software, Xn for me.
That’s a name I have not heard in a long while. I used to use it back on Windows 95 because it was a faster way to view JPEGs than opening Internet Explorer. Everything about that makes me feel old.
I opened the link first and I kept a few seconds trying to remember what we had to use to open JPEGs and GIFs back then. Then I read your comment. Right, IE for images. What a fun world we lived on!
sadly it did, the 3.1 version was the last one that I remember as still not bloated, 4.x was already bad. But up until that, 1.x, 2.x, ..., they were great.
Also remember the times... I think ACDsee 2.3.x was a game changer on Windows systems with little memory back in the day... it was so fast and displayed partially on the fly.
Btw I use a Mac nowadays and I get strong ACDsee vibes from open-source Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/ with browsing through images with the mouse-wheel ;)
>I used to use it back on Windows 95 because it was a faster way to view JPEGs than opening Internet Explorer.
That's an amazing sentence. We should frame it and put it in a museum. Actually someone should make a book filled just with quotes like this, call it "Life Before the Gigahertz" or something.
I see so many comments these days bemoaning how slow modern software has gotten, but no one seems to remember/have been alive for the time when just rendering an image would take multiple seconds.
Just goes to show that our expectations scale with the available technology.
And now decoding a jpeg takes the blink of an eye, but we wait five seconds for a widget to render. When it does, we click somewhere else, because in that exact moment the layout was reflown.
Everybody was down with either IrfanView or ACDSee to look at their collection of uudecoded por--er, photographic human figure studies they got off USENET.
Each their own, that's mine. Note that this is not a tech user or developper list, but the list of what I install on any new windows pc, including those at work etc ...
7zip (open any archive)
VLC (open any audio/video file)
IrfanView (+ the "all plugins" installer on the same page, open any picture file)
SumatraPDF (read PDFs)
Libreoffice (to open any office files)
NAPS2 (easy scan, and split/merge/... PDFs)
Ditto (give your clipboard a memory)
Everything (an instant file search that works)
TeraCopy (replace windows copy with queue, queues, add files to the queue instead of starting a second parallel copy, pause that works, ...)
Powertoys (so many to list ... mass rename file easily, screen ruler, text extractor ...)
If it's appropriate : Qbittorent (clean torrent client)
Nvidia graphic card ? NVCleaninstall, so you can install just the clean driver you need
Windows 10 or 11 ? O&O Shut Up (to disable all the telemetry and onedrive in one click, there are plenty alternatives but I sort of like this one)
Windows 11 ? ExplorerPatcher to remove suggestions in the start menu and the new and terrible castrated contextual menu
And of course your browser of choice and extensions
In ten minutes you have a computer that feels much more smart and usable. There are plenty of great software out there, but I feel like many what to install lists are very topical or include software you won't use in many cases or once every 6 months, so this is my short list of what you will use essentially every time you use the computer.
I recently started having trouble with 7zip at work due to shared sharepoint folders and the like. I wound up finding ZanaZip which was forked from 7zip but keeps up with modern OS changes.
Thanks for sharing your list; I already use many of them but learnt about a few new ones that I'll try. I second Everything, the best, nifty little, Windows search utility that is blazing fast.
Not using windows much anymore, but great to hear about O&O and ExplorerPatcher. I notice you don't list an ssh client. I still install cygwin for that. Anything new besides putty?
Windows now have OpenSSH client (and server) available as optional features. Together with the new terminal the ssh client seems to be working fine. Personally I usually opt in to use the ssh in WSL as I keep it installed on all my Windows machines.
SSH client is not for non tech users and I tried to keep my list non tech oriented, something you can install on yours, your mom or Janice from accounting and they will all benefit from it.
For SSH I was a die hard team PuTTy for a long time but these days one of the first thing I install on my windows computer is WSL and a Debian inside, that covers all my SSH needs.
The reason I started with TeraCopy was that it could to automatic verify after a move but before deleting the originals. Had lots of problems with corrupt transfers and wanted to be certain.
Now it's just what I use, I know it works and my files are safe.
This is my list, but it’s pretty opinionated and is missing some pieces: Backblaze Backupper, Canon CaptureOnTouch, YNAB CLassic, and GPSoft’s Directory Opus
graphic converter for mac OS. I'm still looking for a windows or linux image program that lets you do a slideshow and push a button to move/copy the current image to preset folders - for sorting images.
Ah, the nostalgia when Windows what so shitty that you actually needed a tool for the simplest of the simplest tasks of viewing images in all kinds of formats.
I see no need for it for myself as even Windows has a default image viewer that is enough for me and I mainly use Linux anyway and every decent distro comes with a tool for that. Gnome and KDE both have their own that fit into the DE perfectly.
Good to hear your smug, self-satisfaction is keeping you warm, but anyone who thinks this is comparable to the default image viewer in Windows (even windows 30+ years after IrfanView) is out of sync.
Next time, try to not let your brain shut off when you read something you do not like. I never said it's comparable. I said it's enough FOR ME, I do not need anything like that. Likewise, I do not even know what the windows' viewer can do, I think it can rotate and save in a different format. I do not even need to rotate. I just need to view images, and if I really need to edit images I would fire up GIMP or try out Krita, but I do not. We just fail to see the need, I either just VIEW images or I want to edit images both ends have excellent tools, I do not need some middle ground tool.
Literally everyone else in this thread said the exact same thing, they do not use it anymore because nobody needs it anymore.
Speaking of out of sync: Enjoy your self-satisfaction in using some ugly ass looking outdated software that has 100 functions you do not use.
I downloaded IrfanView and ran "strings" on the exe file, and one of the strings in there is "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library" - so that would point towards C++ (although it's not certain from that alone).
Yeah, Irfanview dates to a time when MS’s C compiler was horribly out of date (still stuck in C89 compatibility), and the only way to get remotely modern language features was to compile it as C++, even if you never used any C++ features. Everyone was programming in “C++” on windows back then even if they were basically writing C.
So yeah, it’s C++ but that doesn’t necessarily tell you much, it could still very well be basically C.
When I have a hundred million images scattered on my computer and I need to quickly see them, nothing like a good script to herd them in a plain txt file and piping it to irfanview! No fidgeting with sixels, bat, or any other gui application. Hands down the fastest way… IMHO.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadCTRL-P pastes anything (image, text; not sure what else) in clipboard to a file in current directory
wasd for games, ctrl+shift+qewasd for play/pause/forward/backward/next/prev and so on. Don't need to switch window, don't need to move hand away from wasd. Can't live without it now even though I don't have so much playtime any more. Works just as well in any other environment.
Even works as a portable app.
https://getwacup.com/
Just some of the few keyboard shortcuts in Potplayer I use regularly:
"<" and ">" to shift the subtitle sync by half a secondd "shift-<" and "shift->" to adjust the audio sync by half a second "[" and "]" to set an A-B repeat of that awesome scene or soundtrack "D" and "F" to move by a single frame forward and backward there's also shortcut to decrease and increase things like saturation and brightness by 1% or shortcuts for 0.5x, 1x, 2x size.
I have to make do with SMplayer in Linux which is awesome but you have to setup the keyboard shortcuts manually yourself.
Enter/return to go full screen (or exit from full screen?).
1. Windows 11 now ships with quite a decent and powerful image viewer/editor that covers most average users' use cases, therefore lowering the demand from people to go out of their way to find alternatives, like in the Windows XP days, which is a good thing (less likely to go download malware from the first Google result of "image viewer for Windows XP").
2. PC usage behavior has changed a lot since then. Many people don't even have PCs at home anymore, and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or on their phone or some external NAS that comes with it's own browser viewer app, instead of hoarding them all on their home PC hard drive, further lowering the need to seek out dedicated image viewers to manage giant offline collections of digital camera pics(I mean I still do, but I'm a minority nowadays).
These two factors combined meant the death of the third party PC image viewer app. Yeah, Irfan might be "the best", but the need for the best in this sector has declined significantly, and most users are now fine with "good enough".
And yes, at times it flickers and or images can tear.
I mean why would I? If all I need is viewing a couple of photos every now and then, cropping and rotating one or two and drawing some circles on them to highlight something in a screenshot and Windows already does that then why bother with Irfan other than habit and nostalgia.
...until Google closes their account or their data becomes otherwise inaccessible!
It horrifies me that so many people are so willing to commit their valuable data to the cloud just because of convenience.
Leaving aside Big Tech's spying on users and selling away their privacy, users who commit data to the cloud put its integrity and ultimately its long-term survival in the hands of third parties who couldn't give a damn whether it was lost or destroyed—their only interest is the income it generates.
That the shift to the cloud has been so complete is very disconcerting. It never ceases to amaze me that so many are so trusting of others that they'd actually hand over their valuable data for safekeeping to the likes of Google, et al. I've used the internet since before the inception of the Web and I've never once committed any of my data to the cloud (but if I had to then it'd be an encrypted backup).
Re IrfanView, I used to use Ed Hamrick's rather excellent image viewer VuePrint until I came across IrfanView about two decades ago. For numerous reasons IrfanView is the best viewer out there.
And by the way, you don’t actually know the probability of a random person losing access to a Google account vs losing physical mediums, let alone how many of those cases were cases where their only photos were stored there. It’s obviously different from person to person, and maybe you can estimate that one is safer than the other in individual cases, but you can’t extrapolate that and say it applies in every person’s case. But the GP was referring to cases where it was implied the only copy was stored on the cloud.
I used to get horrified too until I learned that average user doesn't care much about losing pictures. My wife has lost phone full of pics multiple times and she's upset for like few hours.
It's easy to obsess over the idea of any data loss, because the value of some data is quite high. But for most people in most circumstances losing their cloud hosted photos is probably not a big deal, and it's also probably far less likely than the users losing locally stored photos due to some mistake of their own.
I go back through photos and videos of my kids and it reminds me that I succeeded at something worthwhile and difficult for at least a period of my life. They had a blessed childhood.
Food or selfies and even holiday snaps mean little. But the kids... that's the raison d'être.
Overall it's these photos and videos that are my strongest motivation for the paranoia-level backup setup I have.
… and lossless cropping, too.
Irfan for images and vlc for video is the name of the game for me (and total commander for file management, the efficiency compared to simpler stuff is still in wow territory).
Wish there was a mac version, but it can be run in an emulator easy enough.
IrfanView likely still supports more formats, since it was earlier than any other tool. This means any edge cases in file encoding that might not work, or render ideally likely has been solved there first.
It probably has some batch file conversion tricks in it too.
IrfanView also provided for free for a lot of years what was hard to get without paying. If it existed on mac I'd be all over it.
Ah, the windows viewer always wasn't that good.
And if I remember the big first improvement of it was copying a lot of IrfanView.
Since this post, I remembered another old friend that was excellent on windows, AcdSEE. Also worth looking into.
Windows has shipped with an image previewer since Windows ME. You can see it in this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_ima...
There was also a Microsoft Photo Editor that was bundled with Office 97: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor
Democracy and economics.
>Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"?
It's not constantly, it's the answer to this question. Why are you getting your knickers in a twist?
In this case he gave the answer to the question of why Irfan view isn't popular anymore and the answer is because the majority of people have moved on.
It's not something he decided or that he can change, it's just the fact and he's reported it to you. The fact that you don't like the reality, is your own issue.
> Who cares what 'most people do'?
Someone trying to understand why _most_ comments reflect a certain behaviour is, by definition, someone who cares about understanding what "what most people do".
'Most people' = LCD/lowest common denominator.
If one doesn't mind grovelling around at the bottom then that's fine.
We are now in an age where expected norms in society are such that the slightest criticism of anyone—even if justified—is taken as offensive by both the recipient and by onlookers.
Unfortunately, keeping mum and not saying anything just lets people off the hook, they no longer have to justify their actions either to themselves or anyone else. In fact, I'd argue that in recent years the trend has gotten so bad and out of hand that it's having a very noticeable negative impact on society.
Clearly, I'm older than you, when I was younger this comment would have hardly raised an eyebrow (right, I'm old enough to have noticed this societal change and the negative impact it's had).
When I was at school we were actively taught to ignore unwarranted critism, and even if it were justified to consider carefully what was actually said before responding. In fact, the old adage that 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' was drummed into us kids at a very early age (in infants school). Can you imagin teachers teaching that today? I'd reckon they'd likely be lynched.
Now, what's the situation nowadays when kids are no longer taught how to develop and strengthen their resilience? Well, one only has to look at the fallout on social media. Now we have kids taking such great offense at something someone has said to them and they're getting upset to such an extent that some even resort to suicide. (When I was a kid suicide was something that only adults with disturbed minds did—never kids or teenagers, it was unheard of. No doubt there were isolated instances but we kids never heard of them.)
1: https://github.com/woelper/oculante
I suppose the key difference is that some people want just a read-only image viewer that traverses a directory, while others want a photo viewer, or image metadata editor, or photo management system. I haven't used Windows' default image viewer in ages, but I recall when I used it, rotating an image actually rotated the image, as in it changed the orientation header of JPEG files and rewrote the files. This is why I have trust issues. If even image viewers can't just view the image, how can I possibly trust the software that drives cars, flies planes, or does the banking?
Not really the difference in context of IrfanView which is also just an image viewer.
I tried JpegView, but it’s lacking several features I use in IV, and stuff I commonly do in IV is harder to do, so for me IV is a clear and easy winner. Performance is a little better, but not in a way I’d actually care about (mainly superfast skipping through images is slightly faster)
* Settings in one place, that way I could have probably easily found out how to remove the annoying zoom-features.
* Batch conversion
* Slideshow: Add files/folders, not just a textfile or folder
* Slideshow: More options in general, e.g. random or unique random.
I do think it's odd to expect an image viewer to be able to do batch conversion, though. That's what I meant by a read-only image viewer.
Plus, there are Windows Store and portable versions which help to use it on otherwise locked-down company computers.
If I had to go back it would def be one the first I installed.
IrfanView and foobar2000 (mp3 player) haven't left my side since I started using them. Ditto (clipboard manager) has also earned its place.
it can be found here, and a few other places as well, but unfortunately the source code was never shared. Though it was such an amazing, blazing fast and bloatfree app, such a shame the code was never shared, and now it seems lost, unless the author is around somewhere?
Maccy on macOS is about half as good which is still an absolute unit of a tool. Couldn’t use a Mac without it.
> The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used.[4][5][6][7] The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables[a] or slab, before the term byte became common.
> The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte, as 2 to the power of 8 is 256.[8] The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte.[9] Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Buchholz_1956_1...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_ref-Buchholz_1956_1_...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Rao_1989-6
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-Tafel_1971-7
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-ISO_IEC_2382-1_...
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#cite_note-CHM_1964-10
Also I was under the impression just the DLLs for all the image formats would be over 4 MB. I wonder how large is it uncompressed.
WHAT? IN 4 MB??? WHAT???
That's amazing!
Modern operating systems and especially web dev have made entire generations forget how powerful computers and software are / can be.
This is the lightest fastest yet feature rich media player for windows I know. Its 12 MB compressed though. Didn't know irfanview could do that
https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc
Now I mostly work on macOS, and miss it. I guess XnView is close enough.
Any windows PC I use doesn't feel right without the irfanview logo somewhere.
Btw I use a Mac nowadays and I get strong ACDsee vibes from open-source Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/ with browsing through images with the mouse-wheel ;)
That's an amazing sentence. We should frame it and put it in a museum. Actually someone should make a book filled just with quotes like this, call it "Life Before the Gigahertz" or something.
Just goes to show that our expectations scale with the available technology.
This way I can install almost everything I want with one command.
I'll post my list tomorrow when I'm back on my PC.
7zip (open any archive)
VLC (open any audio/video file)
IrfanView (+ the "all plugins" installer on the same page, open any picture file)
SumatraPDF (read PDFs)
Libreoffice (to open any office files)
NAPS2 (easy scan, and split/merge/... PDFs)
Ditto (give your clipboard a memory)
Everything (an instant file search that works)
TeraCopy (replace windows copy with queue, queues, add files to the queue instead of starting a second parallel copy, pause that works, ...)
Powertoys (so many to list ... mass rename file easily, screen ruler, text extractor ...)
If it's appropriate : Qbittorent (clean torrent client)
Nvidia graphic card ? NVCleaninstall, so you can install just the clean driver you need
Windows 10 or 11 ? O&O Shut Up (to disable all the telemetry and onedrive in one click, there are plenty alternatives but I sort of like this one)
Windows 11 ? ExplorerPatcher to remove suggestions in the start menu and the new and terrible castrated contextual menu
And of course your browser of choice and extensions
In ten minutes you have a computer that feels much more smart and usable. There are plenty of great software out there, but I feel like many what to install lists are very topical or include software you won't use in many cases or once every 6 months, so this is my short list of what you will use essentially every time you use the computer.
MPC-BE for video/audio
XnViewMP
Firefox for PDFs
MS office web (no need to install anything)
Windows 10+ includes clipboard history
PowerToys does have a file search, not sure how it compares to Everything
For SSH I was a die hard team PuTTy for a long time but these days one of the first thing I install on my windows computer is WSL and a Debian inside, that covers all my SSH needs.
TreeSize (to easily find out what is consuming disk space)
picpick/ shareX (screenshotting with annotationsand autosave)
pdftk (pdf merge, split, crop, interleave(
ffmpeg (video trim, split, re-encode, etc.)
Lossless cut (GUI for ffmpeg trim and extract/add tracks)
OpenShot video editor (when DaVinci Resolve is too much for the job and you need simple edits and effects)
OBS Studio (screen record, stream to youtube)
WinDirStat (which used to be my goto) took over 6 minutes and ate 625mb of ram.
TreeSize Free took over 30 seconds, I'm not sure how much ram as it doesn't report it. It also kept trying to upsell me.
WizTree took less than 8 seconds. What's wrong with it?
edit: 2tb nvme ssd, mostly full of rubbish, windows 10.
Now it's just what I use, I know it works and my files are safe.
>VLC (open any audio/video file)
SMPlayer using mpv on the backend
https://gist.github.com/Christoph-Wagner/c26ee84105edd12b4d3...
Someone remember other popular image viewers at the time?
I see no need for it for myself as even Windows has a default image viewer that is enough for me and I mainly use Linux anyway and every decent distro comes with a tool for that. Gnome and KDE both have their own that fit into the DE perfectly.
Literally everyone else in this thread said the exact same thing, they do not use it anymore because nobody needs it anymore.
Speaking of out of sync: Enjoy your self-satisfaction in using some ugly ass looking outdated software that has 100 functions you do not use.
Does anyone know what programming language it is made with? I did a cursory search but cannot find any information. Just curious.
So yeah, it’s C++ but that doesn’t necessarily tell you much, it could still very well be basically C.
Thank you very much.
From myself (1995-...) and my father (1995-2003).