Irfan View The Little Image Viewer From Bosnia Paul Jones
Graphics programs are essential in today's world. If you have a computer, chances are you are going to want to view graphics quite a bit, whether looking at pictures people send you as email attachments or viewing a fax as a multipage TIFF file.
When someone mentions a graphics program, the first thing that comes to mind for many is an application that will allow a user to paint, draw, or edit an image. Photoshop, PhotoPaint, Paint Shop Pro and Windows Paint are examples. But what if all you want to do is view images, not create or edit them? That means pulling up a full-featured graphics application and waiting two or three minutes for it to load before finally seeing the image. And what if you have an entire folder of images you want to browse through? Those large graphics applications are great for creating and editing individual images, but are fairly bulky and slow. Navigating through a folder of images just isn't convenient with them.
A student named Irfan Skiljan from Jajce, Bosnia came up with a nifty little image viewer back in 1996. It had a tiny file size, a plain interface, and was contained in a single executable file. You couldn't create images with it and, although it featured some effect filters, it was practically useless as an image editor. But it was a superb image viewer. Once Irfan View was configured as the default image viewer, you could pop open an image file in a second or two. No more of that waiting thirty seconds or more for some bulky graphics software to open. And Irfan View had some great time-saving features. You could move quickly through an entire directory of images simply by using the Spacebar and the Backspace key. And it was freeware.
