Photos and pictures

Once you get past the expensive professional imaging software, the freeware and shareware options abound. Find our top three picks below.

  • Paint.NET

    Paint.NET

    If you don't want to bother with Adobe Photoshop or one of the other commercial photo-editing applications, your best choices are The GIMP and Paint.NET. Even though it requires the Microsoft .NET Framework (GIMP uses a similar GTK+ framework), it's easy to get up and running in minutes with Paint.NET, and aside from advanced editing and macros, we don't lose much when we opt for Paint.NET instead of Photoshop.

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  • GreenShot

    GreenShot

    When PrntScrn and/or Alt-PrntScrn aren't enough (e.g. a Web page that requires several screens of scrolling), try this open-source solution for nabbing screenshots. Capture a region, window, full screen, or scrolling Web page with a few clicks, then export to file, clipboard, printer, or e-mail, or upload to a file-sharing service like Flickr or Picasa. Simple, free, functional. We love it.

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  • IrfanView

    IrfanView

    The debate among Download.com staffer was whether or not users need any image viewer other than the default Windows "Preview" option. After hours of heated arguments back in forth, the answer was yes! Long-time Download.com favorite IrfanView not only lets you view all sorts of images in all sorts of ways like slideshows and screensavers, you can also batch convert files, extract icons from EXEs, and complete fairly advanced editing actions. So it's much more than an image viewer, we suppose. Who cares? Just get it.

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    • Average User rating: 4.3 stars out of 3417 user reviews