With any computer system there is a point reached where the software you like is on a different platform and you have to find some workaround. Various types of virtualisation are common workarounds. Wine is a type of virtualisation that allows some software packages designed for Windows to be run under Linux.
Well, IrfanView can be run under Wine, but you have to make sure you download the Zip version of the software package because the installer uses MFC42.dll which is a Windows component. Installing Wine is straightfoward using the PPA from WineHQ as described here.
Extract the Zip archive into a folder and copy it to Wine's Program Files or Program Files (x86) folder (/home/username/.wine/drive_c). I found that simply starting it with the wine command worked first time and no other fiddles were necessary.
The shortcut icon seems to be a tricky issue with Wine as you have to extract icons from the software package. There are some tools such as icoutils that will help with this. In the case of IrfanView, icoutils wasn't able to get any icons out of the exe file. I can probably get the icon from Windows.
Of course another option to Wine is to use a native Linux package. XnViewer is a possibility; I don't know about any other packages that might be available.
