Scan & Fix 50 registry issues FREE 
Jessica Dolcourt, Senior 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 | April 07, 2013 | March 27, 2013 | November 08, 2012 | October 09, 2011 | February 07, 2013 |
| Editor's Rating | | | | | |
| Average User Rating | | | | | |
| Review Date | October 03, 2012 | January 29, 2010 | August 29, 2012 | November 09, 2009 | October 06, 2008 |
| Summary | Despite its name, FastStone Image Viewer is more than just a program for viewing images. It's also capable of performing a fairly significant number ... 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 | IrfanView is one of the longest-serving and most popular freeware image editors available. Fast, compact, and flexible, IrfanView is also packed with features and extras, ... 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 | 30863 | 8346 | 85177 | 10064 | 5715 |
| Total Downloads | 9989546 | 4819056 | 68044450 | 6739110 | 3408805 |
| File Size | 5.28MB | 14.26MB | 1.57MB | 3.56MB | 73.34MB |
| Operating Systems | Windows 7 Windows 8 Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows Windows Vista Windows 98 Windows Server 2008 Windows Me | Windows 7 Windows XP Windows Windows Vista | Windows 7 Windows 8 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 |
