XnView
Introduction
XnView is a very useful, multi-purpose image-viewer utility. You can use it to view images, edit them and most importantly, convert them to other image formats. XnView recognizes more than 400 graphics formats and it is really easy to use. Finally, a good thing about XnView is that there is a version available for almost any operating system that you might think of! Without loosing any time, let’s move forward!
XnView Installation:
You can download XnView from the official website: http://www.xnview.com/ . Now we will cover the installation procedure:
- Double click on the setup and click “Next”
- Select the option “I accept agreement” and click “Next” again
- Select a location where you want the application to be installed and click “Next”.
- Take some time to un-tick any components that you are not interested in and when you are finished, click “Next”
- Again, click “Next” for the following 2 steps.
- Click “install” and then, “Finish”
Now that the XnView is installed, let’s have a look at how you can use it.
How to use XnView:
Let’s launch XnView
Click on: Start->Programs->XnView-> XnView
In the “Tip Of the Day” screen, just click close; we aren’t really interested in tips right now!
This is what you are now looking at:
- In the image above, by pressing the various buttons in the group #1, you can do operations such as search, print, delete, rename, rotate etc. If you move the mouse button over any button, a tip-box will pop-up with a short explanation of what each button does.
- You can use the browsing area (Marked with number #2 in the image above) in order to navigate through your computer and find the files that you are interested in. Use the navigation and select a folder that contains images. As soon as you have done that, you should be looking at something that looks like this:
- In the image above, the white area to the right of the screen (marked with the number #2) displays all the images that are included inside the folder that you selected.
- If you select an image, it will be displayed in a larger version inside the grey area (Number #1 indicates the selected image as well as its larger version inside the grey area).
- In order to do some interesting modifications to an image, you need to double click it. When you do that, XnView will open a separate tab which displays only the image that you selected.
- Now in order to convert an image to another format, go to File->Save As… In the “Save as type” field, select the new file type that you want. Once you have done that, simply click “Save”. Easy, wasn’t it?
Conclusion
XnView is a very easy-to-use and powerful utility. Although it comes packed with tons of features, it really takes only a few minutes to master it. What's more, no matter what operating system you are using, chances are that there is a version of XnView available for you too, for free!
