XnView Portable for Windows

A well-designed image editor can make the difference between quickly editing and sharing your photos, and getting bogged down in hours of tedious corrections. XnView Portable is a surprisingly feature-filled image editor that's made for easy, on-the-go image editing. While it doesn't allow serious retouching work, it's a great choice for basic and intermediate editing tasks.

The program's interface is attractive and intuitive, with sleek graphical buttons and well-organized menus. A browser pane enables you to easily navigate to and view thumbnails of your images. The program's features aren't particularly exciting, but all the basics are included: users can crop, rotate, and resize images, as well as adjust brightness, contrast, gamma, and balance. XnView also has a red-eye correction tool, a slideshow feature, and a format converter that supports batch processing. We especially liked the fact that the program's effects dialog lets you preview effects alongside the original image. Although we are by no means expert at photo editing, we found all of the program's tools to be easy to use, and we think it's simple enough for beginners but offers enough features to satisfy more advanced users. The program's online Help file is well-written and thorough. Overall, there's nothing revolutionary about XnView Portable, but it provides all the major image-editing tools in a package that will fit on your thumbdrive, and it's hard to complain about that.

XnView Portable installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to all users.