Best Free Image Viewer / Resizer Tool
Today’s digital cameras take great pictures and produce high resolution images. This is great if you will be printing the photos, especially in large sizes (like 8×10 or poster size).
However, if all you need to do with a picture is email it to someone or place the picture on a web page, you should reduce the picture size so that the graphic file will be smaller (which means it will transfer or load quicker).
There are many graphics programs out there, some costing hundreds of dollars that you can use to resize pictures. For the average computer user, these programs are pricey and overkill.
If you just need features like the ability to resize an image, sharpen it, “save as…” as another image format, or even create a slideshow, I strongly recommend you take a look at a great free image utility called IrfanView.
IfranView is completely free for non-commercial use and runs on Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. It is available in a large number of languages including Spanish, German, French, Korean, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Arabic, Swedish and many others.
IfranView also supports batch processing. So for example if you have a folder of images that you want to do the exact same procedure to (reduce to a certain size for example) you can run it as a batch and it will process all selected files at the same time.
For more advanced users, it also can cut/crop photos, apply various effects (blur, sharpen), allow you to change the color depth, and also supports Photoshop filters.
