Editing Photos with IrfanView

I spent a couple of hours yesterday updating my publicity photos for 2008. If you must, you can see the new ones at Gaskin.com> Press Materials > Photos. At least now my photo includes the shirt I wear onstage.

Getting ready for this onerous job (who really likes to look at pictures of themselves for a couple of hours? nobody I know) I checked out PCWorld’s roundup of 14 Downloads for Digital Photography. As nice as the roundup is, I didn’t download anything. I already have The GIMP on the Linux systems I’m running now, so I have no need to download the Windows version. None of the others did jobs I really needed doing, so I passed on all of them.

I am curious why PCWorld left out IrfanView, my favorite photo viewer and editor. Everything I needed to do when taking a large digital file (the original photo) and cropping it for head shots, then for little mini-photos to post on the Web page, I did with IrfanView. Crop, resize, save – all with IrfanView in amazingly short time.

Now IrfanView plays movies and music, too, which surprised me with the new version. It’s almost to the point that any file you click can display or stream through IrfanView. Highly recommended.