IrfanView : A Free Image Viewer |
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| by Oscar Sodani | |
| February 28, 2003 | |
 Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell. Computerized pictures come in dozens of different formats. The GIF format is the most frequently used on the Internet -- most of the icons, logos, and advertisements you see in your web browser are GIF images. JPEG is the second most popular -- almost all of the photographs on the Internet are in this format. But that's not all there is to it. Many of the images used by Windows, like your desktop background, are in bitmap (BMP) format. If you use your PC to receive faxes, you are probably familiar with the TIF format. Have you seen those cute little animations on some web pages? Well, they are in Animated GIF format. How can you view them all? Unfortunately, web browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer don't know how to display all of these image types. Some, like GIF and JPEG, are standard. But others, like TIF, are only used in faxing and by image professionals. Once in awhile, you're going to find yourself with an image you CANNOT view -- what to do? That's where image viewers come in. There are many programs that specialize in displaying all of these various formats. Furthermore, these programs will also let you open a GIF and save it in JPEG (or another) format. Unfortunately, most of these programs are sold for a pretty penny. That's where IrfanView comes in. IrfanView is a FREE program, written by a college student in Vienna, Austria. Don't worry -- the program IS available in English, as well as German. IrfanView lets you open almost any image, and save it in other formats, if you wish. You can either open files from within the IrfanView interface, or you can drag-and-drop image file icons directly into the program. Best of all, the program is very small in size -- it is one file that takes less than 1 megabyte of your precious hard drive space. Enough talk! Where can you download this program? Click on the link below to go to the IrfanView home page. Have a question? Need help? Get free, friendly person-to-person help with your computer questions or spyware questions in our help forums! |
