A free program that I have used for many years is Irfanview. It is a powerful photo editor written by a guy named Irfan living in Vienna, Austria. It has been around since 1996 with many upgrades over the years. Once you learn how to use Irfanview you will really come to appreciate it. It is very small in download size weighing in at 1.5mb. It shouldn’t be compared to Photoshop but is still very useful for the average photo manipulation project you throw at it.

Irfanview

One of my favorite features is the Batch Conversion / Rename. This allows you to take multiple pictures and batch convert them to a different size, different name, different format, add watermark, add overlay text, etc. This will save you a ton of time if you have pictures that are too big and you want to bring them all down in size easily with a click of a button.

Another feature I like is the ability to crop images super quick. You simply hold your mouse and make a box over the main part of the image and exclude what you don’t want on the far outside edges. Then keyboard Ctrl + Y to crop the image.

Irfanview has a “auto adjust colors” feature that works pretty good to brighten up images. If the auto adjust doesn’t look good you can easily undo by clicking Ctrl + Z.

I counted 21 different formats to save a file in. Some of the most popular are JPG, RAW, and PNG. Here is an image showing those formats.

There are so many features and tons of plugins that it would take all day to explain every feature here. I am far from an expert on the program so there is a great deal of help at the irfanview.com website if you need it. Needless to say I highly recommend Irfanview to everyone.

Irfanview is free and can be downloaded here or here.