Hi Bigpocket,
I second this idea. Working part-time as an event photographer, Irfanview is a great tool that helps me to accomplish a lot of basic tasks like shrinking and sharpening of single pictures or large batches of pictures.
Using it on single pictures is fairly easy: You open the picture, click on resize, enter the new size, click on sharpen (if needed) and "save as..." ready.
Imagine coming home from shooting Kim Wilde or Wishbone Ash (I specialize in the stars of my youth) and having to sort out appx. 20 pictures from a flashcard with 300 pics, reducing them to 800x533 pixels for a webgalery with a slight sharpening, adding a copyright annotation in the lower-left corner and then create a webgalery from them. With Irfanview, the workflow for this is straightforward, and once you have set the settings for the batchmode, it will work on hundreds of pictures in a few minutes.
It's the photographer's swiss army knife, and a pain in the ass for those Maccies - there is no Mac-version in the pipeline.
Regards,
Detlev
