In these days where most things have been commercialised to the hilt, it’s always refreshing to come across a free piece of software that performs as well as its pricey rivals. Irfanview has long been a shining example of such a program, and I’ve been using the app for some time for perusing and managing my ever-growing photo collection.

Amazingly, since Bosnian developer Irfan Skiljan released the image viewer back in 1996, he’s generously kept it free of charge in spite of its massive popularity. Perhaps even more incredibly, the app still stands at just over 1Mb, bucking the trend of programs that swell immensely as the feature updates go by. In fact, it’s Irfanview’s slimline qualities that are its greatest asset, helping to make it the fastest image viewer in the West. Images load almost instantaneously when you click on them and you get rapid-fire results when cycling through a directory of photos using the Back and Forward buttons. It’s only when you’re flicking through vast amounts of images using the thumbnail viewer that things get a bit slow, which could easily be remedied do with an improved caching function.

Another of Irfanview’s crowd-pleasing talents is its ability to handle an enormous range of different file formats, including g, somewhat rarely, icon (.ico) files. Unlike many of its rival tools, Irfanview doesn’t try to impose itself as the default viewer for all image types, giving you the option to specify the formats you wish to associate with it for yourself.

The program’s functionality can be expanded by installing plug-ins that allow Irfanview to open other file types, such as movies and audio – again a unique feature among photo viewers. You also get a smattering of basic editing features such as crop, rotate, flip and resize, along with some bread-and-butter effects like blur and sharpen, plus a smart crop function.

Upon first try, many users might be put off by the somewhat basic interface and the fact that it loads new images externally, rather than within the GUI itself. Nevertheless this is a small sacrifice to pay for a program that proves to be probably the quickest way to view images on your PC.