Three weeks ago I asked loyal readers to list some of their favorite utilities. One of the utilities mentioned was IrfanView and I was thrilled to see that I wasn’t the only person who loves it. I wrote about it in September 2008 and in August 2009 so I’m not surprised that readers know all about it. It is also one of the utilities that I include with CorelDRAW X5 Unleashed.

For image editing, I use Corel PHOTO-PAINT. But it can be really slow to use for simply viewing images. And while PHOTO-PAINT supports a lot of formats, it doesn’t support nearly as many as Irfanview. So I use Irfanview to quickly look at images and I have it associated as the default viewer for a number of file types. A quick double-click on a bitmap will launch it into Irfanview nearly instantly. There are many more things you can do with Irfanview that I simply haven’t explored. Best of all, it is completely free!