Free Software for Digital Photos
Freeware to Manage, Edit, Organize and Email Digital Images
Use free image editing software to organize digital photos. There are many free programs, some approaching commercial quality, available to deal with digital images.
Digital cameras and digital photography are now very popular. Digital cameras produce large amounts of digital photographs and these digital images require photo software for manipulation. As good digital cameras tend to be expensive, free software for handling digital photos is also becoming very popular. There are a vast number of free image editing software packages available for download on the Internet.
Most digital cameras come with inbuilt digital photography software, but this tends to be limited in its functionality and users tend to grow out of it after a while. Free photo software can provide more tools, better editing functions and better interfaces than the inbuilt software. For the professional photographer, free photo software will not replace the professional packages, like Adobe Photo Shop or ACDSee Manager. For ordinary users such free software, many of which approach commercial quality, can be more than adequate to their needs.
Breeze Downloader
As the name implies it is foremost a downloader of digital photos from a camera. Using this software the job of getting the pictures from the camera can be automated and the user has control of where the photos go and how they are named. This program has other photo handling tools as well, but it is primarily a photo downloader.
Photoshop Album Starter Edition
This is a free download from Adobe and although not as extensive as their professional products it is a very good photo editor. The image editing tools are adequate for most users, and it also allows users to organize photos, create slide shows and email photos.
Picasa
This fully functional, free product from Google, is fast become the photo editor of choice. It has nearly everything, including downloaders, editing tools, very impressive organization tools, web uploading and email tools. It has a simple interface, easy to use with a small learning curve.
GIMP
This is an open source program which has now become a fully fledged image editor. Looks somewhat like Adobe Photoshop and has a host of features, and because its open source, these features keep on getting better. There are third-party plug-ins available for virtually any process needed to deal with digital images.
Photo Wizard
This free software lets users import pictures from scanners, digital cameras, from the Internet or the PC. It has all the usual features of photo software like resize, crop, enhance, color management, red eye removal and special effects. It allows the user to print photos on a variety of papers and to share photos with family and friends or share them on the Internet. It also has a live update feature to keep the program up to date.
VSO Image Resizer
Good digital cameras create very high resolution photographs which are totally unsuited to emailing or uploading to the web. With this free software these photographs can be resized to the user’s specifications. This software is integrated into Windows Explorer so that it can be used as a stand alone program or used by “right clicking” within Explorer to alter either one image or a batch of images.
These are just a few of the many free products available for handling digital photos. All these programs can be downloaded from the Internet. As users get more proficient and more adventurous with digital photography then they may have to consider commercial products, but these free digital photo programs should satisfy most users for the time being.
