A Newbie's Guide To Using Irfanview
by FreeBaller
Before I start with Irfanview, there are a couple things I like to do to make the job a little easier. I create a "working folder" in which I place all the images I have selected for compression(you did back up the images right?). Inside of the working folder, I create 2 more folders named "thumbs" and "images". Doing this makes it easier to save your batch processed images to the appropriate folder. Ok, now let's get started with the program.
Irfanview is a WIN32 application and is freeware for non-commercial use. You can download the program from the author's site here:
Irfanview
Once you've installed the program, open it up so we can do some batch processing. On the menu bar along the top, click on "File" and select "Batch Conversion/Rename". You should now be looking at the Batch Conversion screen you see below. We will be referring back to this screen and some of the highlights as we move further down the page.
First make sure you are set to batch conversion mode (blue arrow). The files in the white pane on the left hand side are the files you'll be compressing/resizing. To add the files to this pane you use the drop down menu on the upper right(highlighted in blue) to select the folder your original images are in. Once the folder is selected (make sure the the "Include Subdirectories" check-box IS NOT checked) just click the "Add All" button (highlighted in aqua)and your image files will appear in the left hand pane. Now we have to tell Irfanview what we want to do with these images. Click on the "Advanced Options" button (highlighted in orange) on the right hand side of Batch Conversion window to bring up the screen below:
In this example you can see that we are resizing the images to be 500 pixels on the long side by selecting "Set New Size" and entering 500 for width and height. These settings are for our main images. If we were doing thumbnails, we would size them to be around 110 or so. Be sure to check "Preserve Aspect Ratio" and "Use Resample Function" as well. Then click the "Ok" button to go back to the Batch Conversion screen.
Ok we have set the desired size for our images. Now we need to set how much we want them to be compressed. On the left hand side of the Batch Conversion screen, you will see an "Options" (highlighted in green) button next to a drop down menu. Click the button to bring up the following screen:
Set the slider bar to the desired compression percentage. Generally speaking, 60-70% will give you pretty good results and is a good trade off for image quality/file size. Check the "Save Progressive" check box and click the "OK" button to return to the batch conversion screen.
We're almost ready to process the images. All we have to do now is set our output directory. From the Batch Process screen, find the output directory "Browse" button(highlighted in red above). Choose the "Images" folder you created in your "Working" folder if you are batching your main images. If you are doing your thumbnails, choose the "Thumbs" folder as your output directory. Once you have everything set to your liking, click the "Start" button (highlighted in green above). Irfanview will then process your images and hopefully show you a screen similar to what you see below.
If you've done everything right, you should see 0 errors/0 warnings. If there are errors or warnings scroll down through the text in the screen to identify the problem and correct it.
I hope you have found this little page to be helpful. If you have comments or suggestions on how this page can be improved, please feel free to email me at freeballer@uberporn.net. I would love to hear from you. When you're done here head back over to the
VNWR and learn yourself a thing or two :).
