Irfanview is my favorite image editor and viewer because of it's speed of use (by user) and many many formats it can use.
I also love the add ons available for it, which make it almost as good an audio and video player as vlc, even though that's not irfanview's intent.
The website states:
"IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7.
(click here for IrfanView EULA)
It is designed to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.
IrfanView seeks to create unique, new and interesting features, unlike some other graphic viewers, whose whole "creativity" is based on feature cloning, stealing of ideas and whole dialogs from ACDSee and/or IrfanView! (for example: XnView has been stealing/cloning features and whole dialogs from IrfanView, for 10+ years).
IrfanView was the first Windows graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple (animated) GIF support.
One of the first graphic viewers WORLDWIDE with Multipage TIF support.
The first graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple ICO support.
Some IrfanView features:
* Many supported file formats (click here the list of formats)
* Multi language support
* Thumbnail/preview option
* Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
* Toolbar skins option
* Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
* Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
* Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
* Fast directory view (moving through directory)
* Batch conversion (with image processing)
* Multipage TIF editing
* File search
* Email option
* Multimedia player
* Print option
* Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF
* Change color depth
* Scan (batch scan) support
* Cut/crop
* IPTC editing
* Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
* Screen Capturing
* Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
* Lossless JPG rotation
* Unicode support
* Many hotkeys
* Many command line options
* Many PlugIns
* Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"
* No registry changes without user action/permission!
* and much much more"
I actually use this program in Ubuntu using wine, because it is just that much better, in my honest opinion, than the alternatives.
If you are interested in this software you can download it here:
http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm
(I would also download the add ons pack for it here as well.)
The official website is here:
http://www.irfanview.com/
P.S. to Linux users, as of Tuesday, May 31 2011...
If you want to use this in linux, I suggest getting the Portable Apps version, available here:
http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/irfanview_portable
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