Jessica Dolcourt, Senior Associate Editor September 3, 2009
We won't deny that professional photo software and fancy multimedia suites are worth the investment for those who need powerful advanced tuning tools, or who need a cohesive feature set to turn photos into photo books or movies. But pricey pro software like Photoshop or Corel Digital Studio 2010 could be a waste of your greenbacks if you never intend to prime your pixels beyond the basics. Sometimes a quick crop or touch-up is all you really need.
With that in mind, we've gathered five longtime favorites for your management needs. There's FastStone Image Viewer, a full-screen editor with unique controls, and Google's Picasa, which organizes photos into albums and quickly shares them online. We've also included IrfanView, a classic editor that sports batch conversion (as does FastStone's) in addition to easy-access tools, and Paint.NET, a heftier editor with Photoshop-like support for layers. We wrap it up with Gimp, which also sports layers and is perhaps the most similar of the bunch to Photoshop.
| Product Name | FastStone Image Viewer | Picasa | IrfanView | Paint.NET | GIMP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date Added | August 09, 2011 | January 05, 2012 | December 19, 2011 | October 09, 2011 | February 06, 2012 |
| Editor's Rating | | | | | |
| Average User Rating | | | | | |
| Review Date | November 07, 2008 | January 29, 2010 | November 09, 2008 | November 09, 2009 | November 08, 2008 |
| Summary | For a free program, this multipurpose image tool strikes us as a good find. Although the main interface looks too cluttered with buttons at first ... Read more | Picasa Web Albums is Google's Web photo-hosting service. Users get 1GB of free hosting, and images can be uploaded and manipulated using Picasa, Google'... Read more | This image viewer and editor is a longtime favorite among our staff, and with good reason. IrfanView is simple, fast, and free for individual use. ... Read more | If all you want is a quick image retouch, Photoshop is overkill. Paint.NET, on the other hand, is an open-source freeware editor with all ... Read more | The volunteer developers of The GIMP have been working hard to develop a polished, user-friendly, and freely distributed image editor. Although the separated palette windows ... Read more |
| License | Free | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Limitations | No limitations | No limitations | No limitations | No limitations | No limitations |
| Downloads Last Week | 30920 | 16820 | 106704 | 11094 | 8301 |
| Total Downloads | 7940858 | 3945791 | 61363681 | 6021026 | 2968745 |
| File Size | 5.13MB | 14.2MB | 1.46MB | 3.56MB | 19.96MB |
| Operating Systems | Windows 7 Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows Windows Vista Windows 98 Windows Server 2008 Windows Me | Windows 7 Windows XP Windows Windows Vista | Windows 7 Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows Windows 2003 Windows Vista Windows 98 Windows Server 2008 Windows Me Windows NT | Windows 7 Windows XP Windows Windows Vista | Windows 7 Windows XP Windows Windows Vista |
| Additional Requirements | No additional requirements | No additional requirements | No additional requirements | .NET Framework 3.5 | No additional requirements |
| Publisher | FastStone Soft | Irfan Skiljan | dotPDN | Gimp |
