Irfanview - some hints for using the File menu
Irfanview (you can download it from www.irfanview.com for no charge) is a great little graphics program and it's especially useful for resizing and cropping photos without a lot of fuss.
However Irfanview doesn't use the in-built File controls (Open, Save, etc.) that we've become accustomed to in Microsoft Office and other applications (such as Paint.NET) so here are some tips, along with screenshots, that will ease any pain you feel when using Irfanview to open and save your valuable photos after some editing tasks.
So we've started Irfanview, clicked on File, then Open, and we see something like this:
You can see that Irfanview has opened the last folder that was used, namely a folder named Train Simulator. However, we want to work on a photo that's in a sub-folder under the My Pictures folder.
If we were using a program such as Paint.NET, that'd be easy because we could use the quick links in the Open dialogue box to open My Documents then click on My Pictures. In Paint.NET (and other programs) we'd see this, with the quick links down the left-hand side of the dialogue box:
Anyway, Irfanview doesn't have the quick links in its File dialogue boxes so we have to firstly find My Documents and then we'll be able to get to My Pictures because it's a sub-folder under My Documents.
So let's click the arrow on the drop-down list to see what folders we can get to:
And when we click, we see that the My Documents folder is at the top of the list of folders so let's click that and see where we end up:
Now we can get to our My Pictures folder and the photo we're looking for will be in one of the sub-folders you've organised your photos to be stored in.
When using Save As... on the File menu in Irfanview, you may need to use the same steps to get to the folder in which you want to store a photo after you've some some editing.
If you're getting lost in the folders, remember that My Documents is the over-arching folder which contains sub-folders such as My Music, My Pictures and My Videos. In each of these, you should have sub-folders created in which you store your photos and videos, e.g., by month and year or by topics. So you could have sub-folders of your photos from your overseas trip in sub-folders named Tahiti, California, Alaska, New Zealand, and so on, inside My Pictures.
Finally, if you're being frustrated with Irfanview's File menu, switch over to Paint.NET to do your resizing, cropping and other photo tasks.