Irfan View 3.21 View Your Images Any Way You Want Jim Fox
The real strengths of IrfanView lie in its image viewing capabilities. Once the program is open, click on the File menu item, then the Open option and navigate to the folder where your images are stored. A dialog box will select the file to view. Click the Preview active box to see small versions of images before opening them. Once any image is open, simply hit the "space bar" and the next image in the folder opens up.
Also included is a full screen slideshow function that will display the images in any number of ways. All images can be displayed in a folder with automatic or manual advancement, in several different sorted orders or in random order.
Another option is the thumbnail view. Start it and see the standard Windows Explorer tree, except that when you click on a folder, thumbnails are instantly generated on the right hand side for any graphics or image files within the folder. Thumbnails are generated almost instantly; there is none of the time lag witnessed with many other graphics programs.
Once opened in IrfanView, an image can also be edited in many different ways, including rotated, flipped, resized, resampled, change of the color depth or conversion of the image to gray scale. Many different effects can also be applied such as 3D Button, Blur, Emboss, Oil Paint and Edge Detection, to name a few. Another nice feature is the "Set as Wallpaper" option. Once you create that perfect photo, click the "Set as Wallpaper" menu item and the photo is instantly converted to a BMP file, placed in the Windows Folder and set as your default Windows Wallpaper. (Note: it is always named IrfanView_Wallpaper.bmp, so unless renamed it will be overwritten by the next image set as wallpaper through IrfanView.)