IrfanView Portable

IrfanView Portable

There are tons of digital image editors out there to choose from, and picking the best one is often a matter of personal preference. IrfanView Portable is yet another contender in this arena, and while it didn’t knock our socks off, it’s definitely worth looking at. This program packs a surprising number of features into a relatively lightweight package.

The program’s interface is fairly standard for this type of program, with menus and a toolbar across the top. Be prepared for some pretty cluttered screens if you start digging deeply into the menus; the slideshow dialog, for example, is a sea of check boxes, text boxes, radio buttons, and regular buttons. It’s not hard to figure out if you take your time, but it can be overwhelming at first glance. IrfanView Portable has a lot of the basic image-editing features, including sharpening, color adjustment, red-eye reduction, cropping, rotating, resizing, and special effects. It also has some features you don’t see every day, such as the ability to create panoramic images and highly customized slideshows The program also supports batch conversion and renaming, allowing users to convert between 17 different file types. A built-in Help file is well-written and thorough. Overall, we were pleasantly surprised by IrfanView Portable; it’s not going to replace Photoshop, but it’s more comprehensive than we expected. The fact that it will fit on a USB drive makes it all the more attractive.

IrfanView Portable comes as a ZIP file, and it installs and uninstalls without issues.