IrfanView is a wonderful freeware Windows swiss-army-knife for image viewing & editing.
For me, the key features are fast viewing, simple editing (crop, contrast, brigthness, rotation, resampling), file operations (delete, copy to folder) and extended image information access (exif data) combined in the same interface. Versatile batch jobs are a very nice bonus.
But unfortunately IrfanView is for Windows only, and isn't free software. What would be the nearest equivalent for linux?
57 Answers
I heart IrfanView. Although for Gnome, I use gthumb as my Linux equivalent. It doesn't have the myriad of swiss-tools that IV has, but quality scaling, cropping and color adjustment suits me well enough. I do love how gthumb imports photos from my camera :D
2As a Kubuntu user, I've stuck with the default image viewer for KDE - Gwenview. It's sufficient for everyday operations and I believe you can even extend it with plugins.
And yes, GIMP goes without saying, although it might be too bloated for quick edits. ;)
1Personally, I think Picasa from Google is pretty good, although it is not open source.
1I don't know a single solution unfortunately, I ended up using kuickshow for viewing (its the fastest viewer I have seen so far) and the most basic operations, and GIMP for everything else.
Paint Mono is a linux port of Paint.NET of windows but hasn't been updated since 2008.
Firstly Irfanview is free and always has been. Where the OP got the notion that it is otherwise I don't know.
Second - the is no viable alternative. XNview sucks at best and wielding GiMP is this case is like opening PhotoShop to simply look at a file and maybe rename it (total overkill).
Most of the native Linux apps I have looked at want to behave like Lightroom - import everything their own folders and image database, not my structures or ad-hoc folders. I forget which one (but it was in several top-10 reviews), where I wanted to add jPeg comments - easy in Irfanview... the comments ended up in some meta archive for that app, not as part of the image. And so it goes on.
I have found that Irfanview's author is quite open to positive encouraging comments. If he is approached nicely (not so as to anger him), he may even create us a native Linux version. Thinking especially as the Season of Disaster is about to birth Windoze 8.
2The standard answer is GIMP of course. But you might also like ImageMagick for batch processing.
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