XplanaZine

Until recently, I did not know of a good free image editing tool that I could have my students use. Composer helps them create great webpages, and make links galore, but they had terrible trouble with images - they need to crop, they need to resize, and they don’t want to pay $50 for Adobe Photoshop Elements (that’s the price in our bookstore). For a while I tried having people use the wonderful GIMP for Windows - which I think is a great tool, but it is just not user friendly enough for the novice.
But just recently I became a convert to IRFANView. What a great piece of software!!!
IRFANView is free for personal use at home, free for educational users, and for non-profit humanitarian work. Three cheers to Irfan Skiljan in Austria (via Bosnia) for this great product! Apparently at least a dozen women have written to him wanting him to father their children, all because of this piece of software - ha! I wonder what Darwin would say about such natural selection in the digital age. (Although he does not seem to have taken them up on their offers…)
Anyway, this piece of software is definitely worth your consideration - if you want your students to learn something about image manipulation, this is the best free tool that I can think of. Here are just some of its many features:

• All standard image file types supported
• Cropping and resizing
• Image rotation
• Sharpen, blur, and other filter effects

There are all kinds of other features as well (batch processing, slide show creation, thumbnails). The language support shows that Mr. Skiljan has friends in many places who has translated the interface for him - Uzbek, Lithuanian, Turkish… wonderful!
But what is most important is that this software is easy to use for the features that are essential in terms of getting images ready for the web. Students must be able to crop and resize photos in order to make them “fit” whatever kind of design they are doing. And it is so simple! This online review of the software puts it bluntly: “The design of that program is straight and dumb, like a young bull from Texas.” Well, I agree that it’s simple - but there’s nothing dumb about it at all! I looked at about a dozen reviews online and they were all enthusiastic and positive without reservation. It is absolutely admirable software.
For the past year my own strategy in working with images on the web has been to create galleries of 100×100 pixel images, cropped and resized from larger images, that I can drop into text pages, linking the little “image square” to the webpage where students can see the larger image and get more information about it. This allows me to illustrate text pages, without distracting from the text. Here’s an example of these illustrated pages from my online Latin class and from my online Myth-Folklore class. Students quickly learn to click on the image to learn more about it and to see the larger image; they can then return to reading the text when they are done enjoying the image.
The problem is that after a while they want to do the same thing on their own webpages - but there was not free software to help them do that. Unfortunately, I learned about IRFANView too late this semester in order to share it with my students right from the start - what a shame! But now I am ready to go for the fall semester: thanks to Irfan Skiljan!