In recent years, infrared photodetectors have attracted increasing interest due to their promising applications in both military and civil areas. To further realize room-temperature, wide-spectrum, high-sensitivity, fast-response and low-power consumption infrared photodetectors, low-dimension semiconductors are considered as potential channel materials and have been studied widely. Among them, nanowires have special electrical and photoelectrical characteristics, showing enormous advantages in the applications of infrared photodetectors such as small size, low power consumption, high light absorption efficiency, abundant surface states, outstanding ability to separate and collect photoelectrons, good compatibility with Si complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology and so on. At present, nanowires infrared photodetectors are going through continuous progress and breakthrough. In this review, recent advances in semiconductor nanowires infrared photodetectors were outlined in details. At the beginning, the basic characteristics, material choice and preparation methods of nanowires were introduced. Subsequently, many nanowires including binary and ternary compound semiconductors for the use of infrared detection were presented and their current detectable levels were illustrated precisely. Many methods of further improving their detecting performances were also classified and summarized, including constructing heterostructures, applying external field and integrating with other functional devices. On the basis of the above-mentioned advances, a comparison of advantages and disadvantages among different nanowires infrared detectors was given. In the end, the future development trend was indicated based on the challenges in this area and preliminary suggestions for the technical development route were presented.