IrfanView is an image viewer for Windows computers that I have been using for as long as I remember. It has been there for more than 20 years (the first version was released in January 1996) and is still being developed. It is capable of all the most wanted features that anyone seeks in an image viewer and the developer, Irfan Skiljan, keeps adding newer feature in every new version of the software.
One of the new features that I noticed in the latest version of IrfanView is called Hot Folder. What this feature does is that it monitors a specific folder for new images and when new images are detected, it opens them in the IrfanView. And as you can expect, IrfanView supports all the known popular image formats.
In order to use this feature, you can launch IrfanView and then select Options → Hotfolder from the menubar. In the menubar the feature is also described as watch folder for the obvious reason that it is going to watch a particular folder for the new images.
In the small window that opens up, you can choose a folder that you want to watched. Just click on the Browse button and choose a folder. By default the window clearing time is 0 which means that IrfanView window shall stay open to display a picture. If you change this clearing time to anything other than zero, then IrfanView will display the new images from the specific folder but will close the window after the specified number of seconds.
You also have the option to invert the image before displaying it using IrfanView. After choosing these options, you also have to click on the Start button. Now IrfanView keeps monitoring the specified folder and minimizes down in the taskbar. In order to stop this Hot Folder feature, you can just close all the IrfanView windows or select Options → Hotfolder from the menubar and choose to Stop the monitoring.
Conclusion: IrfanView can do so many things with your images. And now the “Hot Folder” feature can also show the images in IrfanView as soon as the images files appear inside a specific folder.
If you have not already installed IrfanView in your PC then grab a copy from http://www.irfanview.net/.
WHAT FOR is this “hotfolder” functionality???????????????
I can find any rational use for this function.
You can copy image files from your camera to a folder. As soon as you copy, they will be opened in IrfanView so you can edit them or resize them etc.