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Originally Posted by Max
Yes , GIMP is very nice... I use it from 10years maybe from time to time... nice piece of software! 
Or 12 ??? There was some debian installed somewhere... I remember and was maybe 1997 when I used gimp first time!
But irfanview has a number of nice plugins that make it really a beast for some purposes... much better than other even fully commercial software! 
As always, who made irfanview MADE really a big step ahead in such freewares...  |
Yes, I have been using Gimp for over 8 years instead of photoshop. But it is not the best program to use if you want to edit a directory full of photos for a quick cropping, or to quickly change the lighting tint, or maybe to convert 1000 gif images to jpg images. Irfanview can make fast batch conversions and renaming, or it can take screenshots by simply hitting the assigned hotkey. Only Irfanview has proved to be as useful for production running of a lot of simple editing to a large database of photos. Xnview, which copied all the Irfanview coding and scripts for years does not work as well because you still need to slow down and click buttons and menus to do what Irfanview does. With irfanview, I can flip through an entire directory of photos by simply rolling the mouse wheel. In addition, Irfanview will play just about any music or video file if you have the plugin file installed. What other 430 KB application will do all that?
Of course, you need Gimp or Photoshop if you want to do some detailed custom image editing such as combining several photos with gradients etc. But suppose you just want to make a quick crop to all the photos in a directory full of simple photos, then convert them to gif images. No need to open Gimp and start clicking menus. No need to load a huge program into memory and hog up a lot of PC power. Irfanview will get the job done faster as well as use less resources. I have had editing sessions where I had over 10 Irfanview windows open manipulating images in different directories, with very small draw on the system resources. Only the installed RAM will limit how many images you can have active in Irfanview. When you are using all your RAM to hold many high res photos, the swap-file will start growing so opening more photos will take some time to write to the swap file. But very little overhead in the Irfanview software hogging processing power.
Anyway, to illustrate how well it works for fast simple operations, see below for a series of top secret schematics I intercepted from a mail server en route from South America to somewhere west of Spain. Note: These are full-size as sent in the top secret email: