9 ms·

Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best image viewer in town, on Windows at

Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best image viewer in town, on Windows at least

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Rinzler89 3y ago
Because of a few things: 1. Windows 11 now ships with quite a decent and powerful image viewer/editor that covers most average users' use cases, therefore lowering the demand from people to go out of their way to find alternatives, like in the Windows XP days, which is a good thing (less likely to go download malware from the first Google result of "image viewer for Windows XP"). 2. PC usage behavior has changed a lot since then. Many people don't even have PCs at home anymore, and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or on their phone or some external NAS that comes with it's own browser viewer app, instead of hoarding them all on their home PC hard drive, further lowering the need to seek out dedicated image viewers to manage giant offline collections of digital camera pics(I mean I still do, but I'm a minority nowadays). These two factors combined meant the death of the third party PC image viewer app. Yeah, Irfan might be "the best", but the need for the best in this sector has declined significantly, and most users are now fine with "good enough".
- typon 3y ago
  The "enshittification" of computing. The Windows 11 default Photo Viewer has probably 20% of the features of IrfanView - and the problem is that normal users don't know a better tool exists for free if they need those extra features. As the resident techie in my house I get asked by people to do simple things like overlay text in a certain style or print a photo with a particular resolution or print multiple photos etc. and these tasks are just harder or impossible with the default tools
  - broast 3y ago
    I'm guessing even if they knew the tool existed they would still rather ask you to do it. Not everyone wants to understand computers or download programs
    - copperx 3y ago
      More importantly, not everybody wants to be entirely self reliant. They're ok with small task delegation.
      - cellularmitosis 3y ago
        Sometimes you don’t realize things about yourself until someone else puts it into words. Thank you, internet stranger
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  Does the Windows 11 photo viewer still have that gross flickering when changing images and absurdly slow startup that the Windows 10 photo viewer added when they replaced the old Vista/7 viewer, which had none of these issues?
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    What flickering do you have? I don't see any. As for startup time, I dunno, seems to open in less than half a second for me, though on a relatively high end laptop. On a 10 year old machine it might suffer.
    - nutrie 3y ago
      I rarely use Windows these days, but IrfanView feels lightning fast compared to the built-in Photos app or whatever they call it. I started using IV I think on Win 98 and it's still as snappy and reliable as it always has been.
      - hilbert42 3y ago
        I haven't used the latest Windows viewer because I'm no longer prepared to upgrade to the latest versions of Windows, but the old version was a dog of a program compared to IrfanView, it was slow, couldn't display many formats and would misbehave if the image files were damaged. And yes, at times it flickers and or images can tear.
        Rinzler89 3y ago
        The recent photo viewer is great. I never felt the need to install Irfan anymore just to view photos since .. a long time now. I mean why would I? If all I need is viewing a couple of photos every now and then, cropping and rotating one or two and drawing some circles on them to highlight something in a screenshot and Windows already does that then why bother with Irfan other than habit and nostalgia.
- hilbert42 3y ago
  "...and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or on their phone," ...until Google closes their account or their data becomes otherwise inaccessible! It horrifies me that so many people are so willing to commit their valuable data to the cloud just because of convenience. Leaving aside Big Tech's spying on users and selling away their privacy, users who commit data to the cloud put its integrity and ultimately its long-term survival in the hands of third parties who couldn't give a damn whether it was lost or destroyed—their only interest is the income it generates. That the shift to the cloud has been so complete is very disconcerting. It never ceases to amaze me that so many are so trusting of others that they'd actually hand over their valuable data for safekeeping to the likes of Google, et al. I've used the internet since before the inception of the Web and I've never once committed any of my data to the cloud (but if I had to then it'd be an encrypted backup). Re IrfanView, I used to use Ed Hamrick's rather excellent image viewer VuePrint until I came across IrfanView about two decades ago. For numerous reasons IrfanView is the best viewer out there.
  - jenscow 3y ago
    Because the chances of Google closing accounts or losing data is much lower than a consumer's usb drive being damaged or lost.
    - celdon25 3y ago
      …that wasn’t the point? Keeping possessions safe is the responsibility of the possessor. If you keep them all in one place with no backups, you can lose them more easily. And by the way, you don’t actually know the probability of a random person losing access to a Google account vs losing physical mediums, let alone how many of those cases were cases where their only photos were stored there. It’s obviously different from person to person, and maybe you can estimate that one is safer than the other in individual cases, but you can’t extrapolate that and say it applies in every person’s case. But the GP was referring to cases where it was implied the only copy was stored on the cloud.
    - overtomanu 3y ago
      Plus, it is convenient to sync photos directly from mobile to the cloud without the need to set up syncing software or do periodic transfer/backup from mobile to PC.
gsich 3y ago
It's not.
- j45 3y ago
  Alternative?
  - yau8edq12i 3y ago
    The built-in viewer in windows is fine. I can't really think of a feature that it doesn't have that I need. Could you say why irfanview gets your vote?
    - jajko 3y ago
      The speed, plugins ecosystem, many more formats supported out of the box, crop being faster and more intuitive, often good enough auto adjust. Irfan for images and vlc for video is the name of the game for me (and total commander for file management, the efficiency compared to simpler stuff is still in wow territory).
      - j45 3y ago
        IrfanView started so long ago, got and stayed so far ahead. Wish there was a mac version, but it can be run in an emulator easy enough.
      - copperx 3y ago
        DidectoryOpus is even better, but it's expensive.
    - jjbinx007 3y ago
      The batch image manipulation features it offers are pretty handy. Plus you can press L or R to rotate an image and it has lossless rotate options as well.
      - j45 3y ago
allanrbo 3y ago
It made more sense to go through the effort to install IrfanView when there was no image previewer built into windows, in the days of Windows 95/98/ME/2000. Those only had MS Paint, and I think some versions only supported bmp files (no jpeg or gif). Windows XP had an ok image previewer.
- joshuaissac 3y ago
  > no image previewer built into windows, in the days of Windows 95/98/ME/2000 Windows has shipped with an image previewer since Windows ME. You can see it in this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_image_preview_to_win98/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_ima...
  - earslap 3y ago
    IIRC the killer "feature" that gave these previewers traction (ACDSee, IrfanView etc.) was that you could just preview a bunch of images in a folder using your arrow keys. So you'd just load one and use arrow keys to see the other images in the same folder. With the built-in options, you'd have to double click images one by one (and close their windows one by one) which was a horrible UX compared to what these provided.
  - lstamour 3y ago
    That’s the “Preview pane” in explorer. It only supports the file types you could preview in explorer, it only “opens” the file currently selected in Explorer, and didn’t let you zoom in or inspect the image in any way that I recall. It was a plain preview that was supported (in ME) by the integrations Explorer had with Internet Explorer, I believe. Often installing IrfanView let you preview more file types in Explorer, and you could open more than one, display them full screen, edit them, resize them, and more…
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  Windows 98 did have an image viewer but it was an optional component. It was called Imaging for Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_for_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_for_Windows There was also a Microsoft Photo Editor that was bundled with Office 97: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor
abulman 3y ago
Agreed - I'm still using it everyday to view and do some minor editing (trimming and resizing pics). It, along with browsers, VLC, Putty, and SublimeText (and now also ObsidianMD) are the first things I will download to a new Windows PC.
haunter 3y ago
I use JPEGView nowadays https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Does it have feature parity? Just from the list it looks like it only supports a small fraction of what Irfan view does.
  - netol 3y ago
    No that many. It supports the most important ones though, and it is the fastest
thih9 3y ago
Most people look at images via browser these days.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  Who cares what 'most people do'? Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"? Have you all forgotten that niche things exist?
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    >Who cares what 'most people do'? Democracy and economics. >Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"? It's not constantly, it's the answer to this question. Why are you getting your knickers in a twist? In this case he gave the answer to the question of why Irfan view isn't popular anymore and the answer is because the majority of people have moved on. It's not something he decided or that he can change, it's just the fact and he's reported it to you. The fact that you don't like the reality, is your own issue.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - scubbo 3y ago
    > Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? > Who cares what 'most people do'? Someone trying to understand why _most_ comments reflect a certain behaviour is, by definition, someone who cares about understanding what "what most people do".
  - thih9 3y ago
    Niche things by definition are less popular. In my grandparent comment I was explaining why standalone image viewers are less popular. Looks like we agree.
- hilbert42 3y ago
  "...via browser these days." 'Most people' = LCD/lowest common denominator. If one doesn't mind grovelling around at the bottom then that's fine.
codetrotter 3y ago
For me it’s because I haven’t run Windows for ages
- monocasa 3y ago
  I've run it via wine for probably close to twenty years now.
Saris 3y ago
The built in photos app is quite good now, although it can't open apple heif files yet.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  It should with the Microsoft HEIF plugin: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pmmsr1cgpwg?hl=en-us https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pmmsr1cgpwg?hl=en-us
  - Saris 3y ago
    Thanks! Good to know.
  - chris_wot 3y ago
    Doesn’t work with “live” photos.
    - Rinzler89 3y ago
      What are live photos?
      - chris_wot 3y ago
        https://support.apple.com/en-au/104966 https://support.apple.com/en-au/104966
shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
I used to use irfranview for many years, but I rarely ever use Windows anymore. I recently started to use oculante [1] for image viewer because its cross os. Before that, I used imv on Linux and xee on macOS. 1: https://github.com/woelper/oculante https://github.com/woelper/oculante
- dantondwa 3y ago
  This is amazing! Thank you for sharing it.
AlienRobot 3y ago
I prefer JPEGView on Windows. What do you think is the best alternative for Linux?
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Just saw this mentioned above, might as well ask here: why? It looks to only support a small fraction of features.
  - netol 3y ago
    It's faster to load images
  - AlienRobot 3y ago
    It opens instantly. It shows just the image by default (no toolbars, scroll bars, menu bars, or status bars). I can disable linear interpolation with F3 and show width/height of an image with F2. It zooms with the scroll wheel, pans by dragging, and it lets me go to the next, previous, first, and last image of a directory instantly, and doing that won't resize the window. I suppose the key difference is that some people want just a read-only image viewer that traverses a directory, while others want a photo viewer, or image metadata editor, or photo management system. I haven't used Windows' default image viewer in ages, but I recall when I used it, rotating an image actually rotated the image, as in it changed the orientation header of JPEG files and rewrote the files. This is why I have trust issues. If even image viewers can't just view the image, how can I possibly trust the software that drives cars, flies planes, or does the banking?
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      > I suppose the key difference is Not really the difference in context of IrfanView which is also just an image viewer. I tried JpegView, but it’s lacking several features I use in IV, and stuff I commonly do in IV is harder to do, so for me IV is a clear and easy winner. Performance is a little better, but not in a way I’d actually care about (mainly superfast skipping through images is slightly faster)
ano-ther 3y ago
It is very much present tense at least to me. It’s among the first programs on all new Windows machines that I set up. Plus, there are Windows Store and portable versions which help to use it on otherwise locked-down company computers.
- loughnane 3y ago
  I was like this too. I moved away from windows machines (to Linux) for good in 2019 though so now I don’t use it. If I had to go back it would def be one the first I installed.
AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
XnView is great. Although I had to tweak the CSS to have a clean UX removing all the excess edges and separators and add dark background.
nickjj 3y ago
IMO it's up there, I've been using it for over 20+ years. IrfanView and foobar2000 (mp3 player) haven't left my side since I started using them. Ditto (clipboard manager) has also earned its place.
- monkpit 3y ago
  To add to that, for me mplayer was clutch for a long time, nowadays I opt for VLC though.
  - integricho 3y ago
    mv2player was a really good option for a period of time, it's a shame it just disappeared, not even it's source code can be found.
    - whitten 3y ago
      That sounds bad. Is it on any old shareware sites ?
      - integricho 3y ago
        https://web.archive.org/web/20120210051507/http://mv2.czweb.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120210051507/http://mv2.czweb.... it can be found here, and a few other places as well, but unfortunately the source code was never shared. Though it was such an amazing, blazing fast and bloatfree app, such a shame the code was never shared, and now it seems lost, unless the author is around somewhere?
- hilbert42 3y ago
  Right, foobar2000 is great isn't it?
- baq 3y ago
  Of the three, ditto easily takes no. 1 spot. Must’ve saved me weeks of juggling windows and trying to remember where stuff was at this point. It’s a superpower, a true game changer if I ever saw one. Maccy on macOS is about half as good which is still an absolute unit of a tool. Couldn’t use a Mac without it.
fmajid 3y ago
Because many HN readers have moved on from Windows.

Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? I was under the impression that it was still the best image viewer in town, on Windows at least

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Rinzler89 3y ago

Because of a few things: 1. Windows 11 now ships with quite a decent and powerful image viewer/editor that covers most average users' use cases, therefore lowering the demand from people to go out of their way to find alternatives, like in the Windows XP days, which is a good thing (less likely to go download malware from the first Google result of "image viewer for Windows XP"). 2. PC usage behavior has changed a lot since then. Many people don't even have PCs at home anymore, and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or on their phone or some external NAS that comes with it's own browser viewer app, instead of hoarding them all on their home PC hard drive, further lowering the need to seek out dedicated image viewers to manage giant offline collections of digital camera pics(I mean I still do, but I'm a minority nowadays). These two factors combined meant the death of the third party PC image viewer app. Yeah, Irfan might be "the best", but the need for the best in this sector has declined significantly, and most users are now fine with "good enough".

typon 3y ago
The "enshittification" of computing. The Windows 11 default Photo Viewer has probably 20% of the features of IrfanView - and the problem is that normal users don't know a better tool exists for free if they need those extra features. As the resident techie in my house I get asked by people to do simple things like overlay text in a certain style or print a photo with a particular resolution or print multiple photos etc. and these tasks are just harder or impossible with the default tools
- broast 3y ago
  I'm guessing even if they knew the tool existed they would still rather ask you to do it. Not everyone wants to understand computers or download programs
  - copperx 3y ago
    More importantly, not everybody wants to be entirely self reliant. They're ok with small task delegation.
    - cellularmitosis 3y ago
      Sometimes you don’t realize things about yourself until someone else puts it into words. Thank you, internet stranger
formerly_proven 3y ago
Does the Windows 11 photo viewer still have that gross flickering when changing images and absurdly slow startup that the Windows 10 photo viewer added when they replaced the old Vista/7 viewer, which had none of these issues?
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  What flickering do you have? I don't see any. As for startup time, I dunno, seems to open in less than half a second for me, though on a relatively high end laptop. On a 10 year old machine it might suffer.
  - nutrie 3y ago
    I rarely use Windows these days, but IrfanView feels lightning fast compared to the built-in Photos app or whatever they call it. I started using IV I think on Win 98 and it's still as snappy and reliable as it always has been.
    - hilbert42 3y ago
      I haven't used the latest Windows viewer because I'm no longer prepared to upgrade to the latest versions of Windows, but the old version was a dog of a program compared to IrfanView, it was slow, couldn't display many formats and would misbehave if the image files were damaged. And yes, at times it flickers and or images can tear.
      - Rinzler89 3y ago
        The recent photo viewer is great. I never felt the need to install Irfan anymore just to view photos since .. a long time now. I mean why would I? If all I need is viewing a couple of photos every now and then, cropping and rotating one or two and drawing some circles on them to highlight something in a screenshot and Windows already does that then why bother with Irfan other than habit and nostalgia.
hilbert42 3y ago
"...and people now have most of their pics in the cloud or on their phone," ...until Google closes their account or their data becomes otherwise inaccessible! It horrifies me that so many people are so willing to commit their valuable data to the cloud just because of convenience. Leaving aside Big Tech's spying on users and selling away their privacy, users who commit data to the cloud put its integrity and ultimately its long-term survival in the hands of third parties who couldn't give a damn whether it was lost or destroyed—their only interest is the income it generates. That the shift to the cloud has been so complete is very disconcerting. It never ceases to amaze me that so many are so trusting of others that they'd actually hand over their valuable data for safekeeping to the likes of Google, et al. I've used the internet since before the inception of the Web and I've never once committed any of my data to the cloud (but if I had to then it'd be an encrypted backup). Re IrfanView, I used to use Ed Hamrick's rather excellent image viewer VuePrint until I came across IrfanView about two decades ago. For numerous reasons IrfanView is the best viewer out there.
- jenscow 3y ago
  Because the chances of Google closing accounts or losing data is much lower than a consumer's usb drive being damaged or lost.
  - celdon25 3y ago
    …that wasn’t the point? Keeping possessions safe is the responsibility of the possessor. If you keep them all in one place with no backups, you can lose them more easily. And by the way, you don’t actually know the probability of a random person losing access to a Google account vs losing physical mediums, let alone how many of those cases were cases where their only photos were stored there. It’s obviously different from person to person, and maybe you can estimate that one is safer than the other in individual cases, but you can’t extrapolate that and say it applies in every person’s case. But the GP was referring to cases where it was implied the only copy was stored on the cloud.
  - overtomanu 3y ago
    Plus, it is convenient to sync photos directly from mobile to the cloud without the need to set up syncing software or do periodic transfer/backup from mobile to PC.

gsich 3y ago

It's not.

j45 3y ago
Alternative?
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  The built-in viewer in windows is fine. I can't really think of a feature that it doesn't have that I need. Could you say why irfanview gets your vote?
  - jajko 3y ago
    The speed, plugins ecosystem, many more formats supported out of the box, crop being faster and more intuitive, often good enough auto adjust. Irfan for images and vlc for video is the name of the game for me (and total commander for file management, the efficiency compared to simpler stuff is still in wow territory).
    - j45 3y ago
      IrfanView started so long ago, got and stayed so far ahead. Wish there was a mac version, but it can be run in an emulator easy enough.
    - copperx 3y ago
      DidectoryOpus is even better, but it's expensive.
  - jjbinx007 3y ago
    The batch image manipulation features it offers are pretty handy. Plus you can press L or R to rotate an image and it has lossless rotate options as well.
    - j45 3y ago

allanrbo 3y ago

It made more sense to go through the effort to install IrfanView when there was no image previewer built into windows, in the days of Windows 95/98/ME/2000. Those only had MS Paint, and I think some versions only supported bmp files (no jpeg or gif). Windows XP had an ok image previewer.

joshuaissac 3y ago
> no image previewer built into windows, in the days of Windows 95/98/ME/2000 Windows has shipped with an image previewer since Windows ME. You can see it in this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_image_preview_to_win98/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/y1lj7x/winme_ima...
- earslap 3y ago
  IIRC the killer "feature" that gave these previewers traction (ACDSee, IrfanView etc.) was that you could just preview a bunch of images in a folder using your arrow keys. So you'd just load one and use arrow keys to see the other images in the same folder. With the built-in options, you'd have to double click images one by one (and close their windows one by one) which was a horrible UX compared to what these provided.
- lstamour 3y ago
  That’s the “Preview pane” in explorer. It only supports the file types you could preview in explorer, it only “opens” the file currently selected in Explorer, and didn’t let you zoom in or inspect the image in any way that I recall. It was a plain preview that was supported (in ME) by the integrations Explorer had with Internet Explorer, I believe. Often installing IrfanView let you preview more file types in Explorer, and you could open more than one, display them full screen, edit them, resize them, and more…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
HeckFeck 3y ago
Windows 98 did have an image viewer but it was an optional component. It was called Imaging for Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_for_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_for_Windows There was also a Microsoft Photo Editor that was bundled with Office 97: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Photo_Editor

abulman 3y ago

Agreed - I'm still using it everyday to view and do some minor editing (trimming and resizing pics). It, along with browsers, VLC, Putty, and SublimeText (and now also ObsidianMD) are the first things I will download to a new Windows PC.

haunter 3y ago

I use JPEGView nowadays https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview

Semaphor 3y ago
Does it have feature parity? Just from the list it looks like it only supports a small fraction of what Irfan view does.
- netol 3y ago
  No that many. It supports the most important ones though, and it is the fastest

thih9 3y ago

Most people look at images via browser these days.

pdntspa 3y ago
Who cares what 'most people do'? Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"? Have you all forgotten that niche things exist?
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  >Who cares what 'most people do'? Democracy and economics. >Why are we constantly resorting to this tired refrain of "majority rules"? It's not constantly, it's the answer to this question. Why are you getting your knickers in a twist? In this case he gave the answer to the question of why Irfan view isn't popular anymore and the answer is because the majority of people have moved on. It's not something he decided or that he can change, it's just the fact and he's reported it to you. The fact that you don't like the reality, is your own issue.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- scubbo 3y ago
  > Why are most comments referring to having used this in the past tense? > Who cares what 'most people do'? Someone trying to understand why _most_ comments reflect a certain behaviour is, by definition, someone who cares about understanding what "what most people do".
- thih9 3y ago
  Niche things by definition are less popular. In my grandparent comment I was explaining why standalone image viewers are less popular. Looks like we agree.
hilbert42 3y ago
"...via browser these days." 'Most people' = LCD/lowest common denominator. If one doesn't mind grovelling around at the bottom then that's fine.

codetrotter 3y ago

For me it’s because I haven’t run Windows for ages

monocasa 3y ago
I've run it via wine for probably close to twenty years now.

Saris 3y ago

The built in photos app is quite good now, although it can't open apple heif files yet.

Rinzler89 3y ago
It should with the Microsoft HEIF plugin: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pmmsr1cgpwg?hl=en-us https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pmmsr1cgpwg?hl=en-us
- Saris 3y ago
  Thanks! Good to know.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  Doesn’t work with “live” photos.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    What are live photos?
    - chris_wot 3y ago
      https://support.apple.com/en-au/104966 https://support.apple.com/en-au/104966

shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago

I used to use irfranview for many years, but I rarely ever use Windows anymore. I recently started to use oculante [1] for image viewer because its cross os. Before that, I used imv on Linux and xee on macOS. 1: https://github.com/woelper/oculante https://github.com/woelper/oculante

dantondwa 3y ago
This is amazing! Thank you for sharing it.

AlienRobot 3y ago

I prefer JPEGView on Windows. What do you think is the best alternative for Linux?

Semaphor 3y ago
Just saw this mentioned above, might as well ask here: why? It looks to only support a small fraction of features.
- netol 3y ago
  It's faster to load images
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  It opens instantly. It shows just the image by default (no toolbars, scroll bars, menu bars, or status bars). I can disable linear interpolation with F3 and show width/height of an image with F2. It zooms with the scroll wheel, pans by dragging, and it lets me go to the next, previous, first, and last image of a directory instantly, and doing that won't resize the window. I suppose the key difference is that some people want just a read-only image viewer that traverses a directory, while others want a photo viewer, or image metadata editor, or photo management system. I haven't used Windows' default image viewer in ages, but I recall when I used it, rotating an image actually rotated the image, as in it changed the orientation header of JPEG files and rewrote the files. This is why I have trust issues. If even image viewers can't just view the image, how can I possibly trust the software that drives cars, flies planes, or does the banking?
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    > I suppose the key difference is Not really the difference in context of IrfanView which is also just an image viewer. I tried JpegView, but it’s lacking several features I use in IV, and stuff I commonly do in IV is harder to do, so for me IV is a clear and easy winner. Performance is a little better, but not in a way I’d actually care about (mainly superfast skipping through images is slightly faster)

ano-ther 3y ago

It is very much present tense at least to me. It’s among the first programs on all new Windows machines that I set up. Plus, there are Windows Store and portable versions which help to use it on otherwise locked-down company computers.

loughnane 3y ago
I was like this too. I moved away from windows machines (to Linux) for good in 2019 though so now I don’t use it. If I had to go back it would def be one the first I installed.

AltruisticGapHN 3y ago

XnView is great. Although I had to tweak the CSS to have a clean UX removing all the excess edges and separators and add dark background.

nickjj 3y ago

IMO it's up there, I've been using it for over 20+ years. IrfanView and foobar2000 (mp3 player) haven't left my side since I started using them. Ditto (clipboard manager) has also earned its place.

monkpit 3y ago
To add to that, for me mplayer was clutch for a long time, nowadays I opt for VLC though.
- integricho 3y ago
  mv2player was a really good option for a period of time, it's a shame it just disappeared, not even it's source code can be found.
  - whitten 3y ago
    That sounds bad. Is it on any old shareware sites ?
    - integricho 3y ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20120210051507/http://mv2.czweb.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120210051507/http://mv2.czweb.... it can be found here, and a few other places as well, but unfortunately the source code was never shared. Though it was such an amazing, blazing fast and bloatfree app, such a shame the code was never shared, and now it seems lost, unless the author is around somewhere?
hilbert42 3y ago
Right, foobar2000 is great isn't it?
baq 3y ago
Of the three, ditto easily takes no. 1 spot. Must’ve saved me weeks of juggling windows and trying to remember where stuff was at this point. It’s a superpower, a true game changer if I ever saw one. Maccy on macOS is about half as good which is still an absolute unit of a tool. Couldn’t use a Mac without it.

fmajid 3y ago

Because many HN readers have moved on from Windows.