SteveH

A couple folks have asked me how I am able to take a picture and add arrows and text to it to simplify the process of communication when troubleshooting, so i thought I would post the answer for all who are interested.

The program I use is called Irfanview. It has been around since the computer stone age began.
It is FREE, really. I have sent in donations from time to time because I love the app.

A link to the website is here:http://www.irfanview.com/

A quick list of the main features I use are:

Control-R - Reduction
F12 - Open the paint dialog.
Once you open this you can use the Arrow and Text tool to append your images
You can change the arrow and text foreground/background colors by clicking on them and selecting a new one.
You can set the line thickness (I usually use 6)
When drawing an arrow, it draws a line at the start and an arrowhead at the end.
Control-Z UNDO (I use this a lot when not happy with the placement of things)

It also has an amazing feature called batch processing.

You can open the batch processing feature, select from one to an entire directory of files, choose the effect from resizing, to renaming, to changing the gamma, and anything else you can think of, you can select a new target location and click begin to have it process them all.

For example, I select a folder full of 3000x2000 images, tell it to resize to 25%, and append "_SM" to the filename, then select a subfolder called "small" (it will create it on the fly if needed) and then start the batch process. 1 minute later I have a whole folder of resized files to be able to post with.

I hope this is useful for folks.

kitsykeel

Thanks for this info. I am not very tech savvy, but this sounds like a useful tool.

Caroline S

There are quite a few links to download from. Which do you recommend?

SteveH

sorry, I forgot about that. I used the CNET. just now to test and it worked well.

cabbagepatchkid

I'll have to check it out! I hope Mac users can use it too!!

Caroline S

Thanks Steve. I will download it and begin to play with it.

ccthomas

Thanks for this helpful information. Can't wait to play with this.

SteveH

No problem. I have been using it for so long I forget to share sometimes.

Caroline S

I discovered very quickly that the downloaded Irfan came with spyware and malware. It took my online computer support people about an hour to scan and remove the "bad boys". Perhaps if I had been a little more computer savvy my computer would not have become infected.

JudyTheSewer

FYI: I use "Paint" to add text and lines to my pictures. "Paint" has been available on all Windows machines that I have ever worked on (no downloads necessary). If you need some help in using this program I will sure try to walk you through it.