IrfanView

You want to open a picture and then move from one picture to the next in the same folder with arrow keys or mouse scroll, again fast and without loading or menus fonctions or whatever ?

You want to batch process a folder to convert all files to png with the larger side limited to 2000px, keep the location data but reset the orientation data, and remove the original file only if conversion succeeded ?

You want to scan something, rotate it and lossy pixelize an area ?

You want to resize, convert, re-encode a picture from one format to another with tonnes of option without resorting to command line because you're on windows and you would like to just do it in the same app you use for every photo thing ?

You want to cut a part of a picture, or identify the pixel color on a picture, or dozens or other every day operations like that ?

You want all of that to be absurdly fast, aka instant, without any complex menu or dozens of clicks to get where you need ?

I've been using irfanview since the beginning too, and it's not for lack of trying other stuff, it's just so much better. It's for me one of those tools, like Everything or Ditto or SumatraPDF or 7zip or NAPS2 or ... That just get what they are and what they should provide, and do just that, and do it right.

Another shining endorsement of "modern" software development (no, check that... software "engineering")

Before I gave up Windows permanently, and that was over 20 years ago, I used this program.

The more things "change" the more they stay the same.

I use Faststone, what am I missing?

That's an amazing sentence. We should frame it and put it in a museum. Actually someone should make a book filled just with quotes like this, call it "Life Before the Gigahertz" or something.

Also I was under the impression just the DLLs for all the image formats would be over 4 MB. I wonder how large is it uncompressed.

Just some of the few keyboard shortcuts in Potplayer I use regularly:

"<" and ">" to shift the subtitle sync by half a secondd "shift-<" and "shift->" to adjust the audio sync by half a second "[" and "]" to set an A-B repeat of that awesome scene or soundtrack "D" and "F" to move by a single frame forward and backward there's also shortcut to decrease and increase things like saturation and brightness by 1% or shortcuts for 0.5x, 1x, 2x size.

I have to make do with SMplayer in Linux which is awesome but you have to setup the keyboard shortcuts manually yourself.

Any windows PC I use doesn't feel right without the irfanview logo somewhere.

CTRL-P pastes anything (image, text; not sure what else) in clipboard to a file in current directory

I reinstalled IrfanView from sheer nostalgia, and while it's still a good program, it doesn't handle pinch/zoom gestures as well as the default app. Same for editing, where IV has more features, yet core stuff like handwriting smoothing isn't as good.

The biggest difference between "these days" and now is IMHO the wide availability of other tools to do more advanced stuff. For instance I remember batch processing features and export features in IV that I used a lot, but nowadays I'd do it in Imagemagick or GIMP.

There is less need for a swiss army knife when the specialized tools are right there any time you need them.

Long gone are the days where people would come to me asking if i could open some file, so the other uses i had for graphicconverter are gone too.

And Irfanview could do those things in it's sleep with both hands tied, with a few simple config changes. But the dysfunction - often rooted in the minimal, grudging acknowledgement given to IT by (non-IT) old professions - led to a lot of half-assed setups where staff butted their heads against obstacles that were often a mere few clicks away from improvement, if only they'd known to put their attention there. But of course, they were too busy being civil engineers.

And if I may shoehorn another point in here : it's not as though AutoCAD and other such industry software comes with ready default settings. If you used those straight out of the box with no customisation for your own situation, you'd be in deep trouble.

What are you talking about? Make a rectangular selection on the image (click and drag across the image), then CTRL+Y. Couldn't be easier.

https://nomacs.org/

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".

1: https://github.com/woelper/oculante

Plus, there are Windows Store and portable versions which help to use it on otherwise locked-down company computers.

IrfanView and foobar2000 (mp3 player) haven't left my side since I started using them. Ditto (clipboard manager) has also earned its place.