Embed picurl in Irfanview

You found our previous WindowsExplorer Tutorial interesting, but prefer the popular image viewer IrfanView for managing your placeholder thumbnails? This tutorial shows you how to achieve similar functionality within IrfanView.

Step 1: Create picurl-download.bat

See the WindowsExplorer tutorial for more information.

Step 2: Configure picurl-download.bat as "external editor"

Open Irfanview, and click on Options -> Properties\Settings or simply press the shortcut P.

Navigate to the Misc. 3 Tab. Click on the first Browse-Button within the Set external editors area (except you've already defined an external editor, then you 'll have to use the second or third button).

Now for the tricky part: you have to navigate to the directory of picurl-download.bat, but likely it isn't displayed, because IrfanView restricts the filetype to .EXE files. The solution: simply type *.bat in the file name field and hit enter. Now picurl-download.bat is displayed and you can select it. Quit the file and the preferences dialogue by clicking OK.

Step 3: Select and Download

Open the Thumbnail module of IrfanView by selecting File -> Thumbnails or just press T.

Navigate to your placeholder thumbnail folder and select your desired photos. Like in Windows Explorer, you can use Ctrl for arbitrary and Shift for consecutive selections.

Finally, select File -> Open with external editor -> Editor 1 (or the one you configured for picurl-download.bat).

Some black windows will pop up - do not close them until the message Hit <ENTER> to close this window appears. If the black windows didn't report any errors, all downloads went fine. Now you can simply double-click on a thumbnail to open up its hi-res version.

Caveats

The smarter picurl users surely realized that IrfanView starts one instance of picurl for every selected thumbnail. Because all instances download their photos at the same time, transfer errors are likely when a huge number of thumbnails was selected. This is because every webserver limits the number of concurrent connections per IP address. We already contacted the author of IrfanView on this issue, but don't have influence when it will be fixed.

Meanwhile we recommend to select/download 5 thumbnails at once as a maximum.