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Add to SafariWhen comparing Spectacle vs Irfanview, the Slant community recommends Spectacle for most people. In the question“What are the best screen capture tools for Windows?” Spectacle is ranked 10th while Irfanview is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Spectacle is:
Spectacle is licensed under MIT with source code available on [GitHub](https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle).
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Spectacle is licensed under MIT with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Simple hotkeys
Spectacle offers easy-to-remember preset hotkeys.
Pro Mouseless
All windows in Spectacle can be controlled with keyboard shortcuts, so no mouse is needed. This makes for a fast way to control windows.
Pro Great UX
Spectacle is easy to use and configure. It's plug and play.
Pro Low footprint
Spectacle only uses up 18-19 MB of RAM, which means there is not much overhead by using this app.
Pro Multi-monitor support
Pro 7+ years of use
Using it for 7 years
Pro Some editing tools included (cropping, color correcting, etc...)
Pro Lots of plugins available
Plugins can be found here.
Pro Batch processing
Even exif information can be batch processed.
Pro Recognizes virtually any image format
Pro You can just scroll with your mouse to explore images
Pro Ultra fast
If you press and hold the right-arrow button (for displaying the next image), you can watch images pass by as if they are a video, it's that fast. No stuttering, it loads images as fast as your hard drive can keep up.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Can use 8bf (Photoshop) filters
Pro Easy updates
Very easy to update the program and its associated plugins.
Pro Irfanview Thumbnail Viewer is a convenient way to view all image files easily
Irfanview Thumbnail Viewer is a great way to view thumbnails of all image files, including thumbnails of WMF files which Windows cannot natively display.
Cons
Con Not maintained
The software is free, but no longer seems to be maintained.
Con Impossible to add new functions
While keyboard shortcuts can be changed for the available actions, there is no way to add custom actions which in turn limits the functionality of the app.
Con Limited window sizing capabilities
You can use 1/2 of the screen vertically and horizontally (divide into 4 parts). You can also use the screen in thirds too, but only the left and right third: you can't use the 1/3 in the center. There is no way to do a more granular distribution.
Con Breaks on macOS High Sierra / Chrome or Firefox
Doesn't support side by side windows.
Con Doesn't work with any Adobe products
There are some apps like Adobe Reader that do not work with Spectacle. Basically, any app with a heavily customized UI that breaks OS X accessibility will not work correctly under Spectacle.
Con GIF viewing is buggy
GIF viewing has longstanding problems like flickering, incorrect framerate or artifacts, and it is very unlikely that it will be ever fixed.
Con Irfanview Thumbnail Viewer crashes on accessing AVI files
For some reason, the Irfanview Thumbnail Viewer crashes when it tries to access any .AVI movie file.
Con No transparency support
The alpha is converted to the selected background color upon opening a picture. When saving the picture again, you can select a color which is converted to alpha again.
Con Missing some utilities
Like browsing files utility.
Con Preferences are hard to find
Con Windows only
Con UI is far from ideal
Sometimes the interface is confusing.
