The following is an excerpt from PC World Magazine's web site, which offers
"101 fantastic freebies". If you don't have Photoshop or you just want a "light" photo
editor, one of these will do you fine.
Even if you have Photoshop, it's sometimes quicker and/or easier to use a program
such as one of the following for simple editing. Some of these allow batch editing as well.
Winner and People's Choice Award: Google Picasa
Why spend several hundred dollars for graphics software when you can use the top-notch free app Google Picasa?
This photo editing and sharing program from Google is a big hit with our editors and polled readers alike. Says one
reader: "Beautiful interface. Excellent for organizing or anything else -- touching up, slide show, screen saver, and
wallpaper." Other respondents, like Erich Tucker, of Woodbridge, Virginia, gave Google Picasa kudos for making it
a breeze to find and edit pictures. We agree.
Snapfire juggles all your image editing, management, and sharing tasks with ease.
Irfanview Yes, we know this one has been around a while. But it's still one of the best free image viewers for just
about any file type, showing detailed information about images, helping you create slide shows, and performing
tasks like eliminating red-eye.
StudioLine Photo Basic Here's a great program for archiving photos and for organizing your collection. We were sold
on the app when we found its handy "Web galleries," which are HTML-coded Web pages, complete with navigation
links to your photos.
Microsoft Photo Info This useful freebie, which integrates directly into Windows Explorer, lets you preview an image
and embed metadata into it by right-clicking it.
FastStone MaxView This petite (1.3MB) image editor is small enough to store on an old floppy disk. Don't let its
size fool you, though: FastStone MaxView sports lots of photo manipulation tools, such as those for rotating,
flipping, resizing, and blurring.
Media Purveyor If you have gigabytes of stored media -- including music, images, and videos -- in need of some
taming, this free program is for you. Not only does Media Purveyor edit images, but it also organizes and sorts
your multimedia library. Plus, the app indexes your library for searching and plays back video and audio, to boot.
GIMP -- GNU Image Manipulation Program - This program is a favorite of open-source software fans everywhere.
No, it isn't the easiest to use, but it's nearly as powerful as Photoshop.
Paint.Net This surprisingly powerful image editing and manipulation program includes unlimited undos and special
effects, and even provides the ability to work in layers.
End of PC Magazine Article
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