Showing posts with label IrfanView. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IrfanView. Show all posts

Sunday, February 22, 2009

IrfanView - Slideshow

Another thing I discovered IrfanView can do is display user chosen EXIF info during a slideshow.
Click on the Help within Slideshow and it tells you how to display what you want.
Very handy.



I also tried creating a screensaver *.scr within Slideshow. That's pretty easy to figure out.

The only tricky part for me was getting the MP3 to play the way I wanted it to. I figure that out by trial and error.

What I liked best:
I had 4 images for the screensaver.
My MP3 was duration 8:35 (515 seconds).
I reduced the MP3 to 64kbps in Audacity to reduce file size of screensaver.

Setting:
IrfanView, Slideshow, Slide Advancement, Auto after 180 seconds.
(180x4 = 720 seconds)



What that meant is the song finished playing and there was a long silence (no music) as the images continued to display.
(720-515=205 seconds, or duration 3:42 of silence)

Once the first image displayed for the second loop, then the music began once again.
I liked the silence break from the music.

I'd prefer that the song played only once and then quit as the images continued to loop indefinitely until I pressed Escape.
I couldn't figure out how to do that.
Final screensaver filesize was about 5,000 KB (4.88 MG).

In that same "Show Text" area mentioned above for displaying the EXIF info,
you can just type in whatever text you want to display on the screensaver images.

You can save it as a *.exe file instead of *.scr if desired.

This is a very nice feature that I plan to work with some more.

Different than the My Pictures Slideshow that I have in Windows XP.

IrfanView Filter Effects

As mentioned recently, I installed the latest IrfanView and plugins for it.
I think it will run all my plugins that I usually load in Paint Shop Pro 9.

And MORE, actually.



Some plugins crash in Paint Shop Pro.
One I was always curious about was Filter Factory Gallery Q Liquid Metal.
I tried running it in IrfanView and it works.
TaDa!
IrfanView has two ways to load Filter Factory plugins, BOTH require them to be converted to *.8bf format. I thought perhaps one of them would load the *.ffl format, but that is not the case.

Also, I tried two of my favorite plugins, MuRa Clouds and MuRa Perspective, and they work in IrfanView also.
Though with a few limitations.
No custom Foreground/Background colors, no transparency.
Although, you can probably work around that easy enough by exploring what options IrfanView does have.
For example, maybe colorizing the clouds after you make them.

This means that anybody out there can create some very nice images in a matter of minutes for FREE with minimum installation software.

Irfanview + MuRa = endless fun and creativity inspiration.

(Get the MuRa Copies plugin/filter also.)

Happy creating!

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Good News Bad News Good News

So I finally had motivation to update my very old IrfanView software and to install all the plugins for it too.

Why?

Well I found out those fractal images I was creating in preparation for animation using that Flam3 script had the flame parameters embedded in the Images. (I think this would increase the file size too. Good to know for optimization purposes.)

Yessery it's right there in the batch file it creates:
REM ------------
REM Embed Flame parameters into the rendered file.
REM Change it to 0 to remove the parameters embed.
REM ------------
set enable_jpeg_comments=1

So I got excited.
I did not know I had the flame parameters.

This is GOOD NEWS.

Okay, BAD NEWS.
Viewed the image info within Paint Shop Pro 9.
The info is truncated.
So I decided to try IrfanView, but I had to update first.
Well, it truncates the info even MORE than Paint Shop Pro.

Okay, GOOD NEWS. lol

All I'm missing is the coloring though, so I can still make use of what flame info is there.
AND
In IrfanView I found out I can copy to clipboard the EXIF image info.
This is good for my photography.
I can view EXIF info in Paint Shop Pro 9, but could not copy and paste it.
I had installed the Canon software last summer just so I would have more access to the EXIF info too.

And here all I needed to do was update my IrfanView software.
I forget that handy dandy little thing.
The only time I use it is for full screen slideshow viewing of my photography.
I guess I should explore it more.
It probably has other useful features I do not know about.

I think IrFanView creates ico files.
I know I'm going to find that useful some day, like when I decide I want to create a favicon.