If the goal is to find an image viewer which is small in size but supports all image formats and is fast, IrfanView is the right choice. There are many image viewer programs that started as simple ones but get really bulked up with each new versions, exception here is the IrfanView. This software is really compact but supports a wide range of image formats and is also very fast. If your primary aim is to view the image, then IrfanView is the software you need.

IrfanView supports most of the graphics formats, including JPEG, GIF, DIB, PCX, TGA, PNG and more. IrfanView is the first image viewer to support animated .ico (icons) and .gif formats. Also it’s the first that can view multipage .tif format. Another key feature in this is the full screen right-click browsing capability, which helps the user to cycle through all image files in a directory quickly. The loading time of pictures in this is really impressive. It gets easily adapted to the plug-ins been added onto it.

Another salient feature in the latest versions of this software is the multiple monitor support glitch. This helps you to drag an image to the secondary display which in turn display in full screen effectively. One significant role of IrfanView is that, it allows you to save image files as icon files. This feature is not that common in other image viewers. Image editing and manipulation are really easy and fast here. We can crop, sharpen, color correct, fix red eye etc very effectively and fast with this software. A basic drawing palette is also made available to user by pressing f12 key in the software which contains several options like simple erase, fill, rotate, color pick etc.

The main drawback in this software seems to be the outdated user interface look.  The GUI work here is not that great and can have some serious improvement. It has also got one single undo level. The Google toolbar and Desktop search toolbars are bundled with the software and need to be opted out manually. Though the layout may be a little unattractive but still it’s really powerful. This software works effectively in the previous versions of windows too going back to Windows 95.

In short IrfanView is a sweet compact packaged deal. It make image viewing more easy, fast, efficient and simple. It’s a really small software supporting any possible formats of graphic images. Though IrfanView may not replace a major paint program, but still it will be the one much preferred when the need is to view a simple image.