Free picture viewers and organizers

Like I promised, after free video and DVD players there is a time for free picture viewers, librarians and actually editors too.

FastStone Image Viewer

This is my choice for picture viewer and organizer. FastStone Image Viewer is simple and powerful program available for Windows and, what is just a plus, also as portable application. It supports all major graphics formats and is able to create impressive slideshow from your photo collection.

FastStone offers basic editing functionality as red eye removing, resizing, cropping, correcting colors, drawing into picture, applying picture frames, rotating, even screen capturing and you can do most (like for example resizing) changes in batch mode on several pictures at a time which allows you also to rename the pictures and change their format.

Simple interface, possibility to edit default settings, image smoothing, multilingual support and very intuitive control makes FastStone Image Viewer a must. You can download recent version from www.faststone.org.

Photoscape

Simple image viewer and editor for people who love to play with pictures could easily be just Photoscape. At first it impress you with its unconventional main screen and tabbed interface, but what is under the facade is even more impressive.

Besides all the functionality similar to FastStone including multilingual support, it offers cool features like round cropping, facial recognition, picture combining, applying several different filters, and creating animated GIF pictures!

For more information and download page visit www.photoscape.org.

Google Picasa

Unfortunately, I haven’t had much experience with Google’s cross-platform image viewing and editing application Picasa but as it is quite popular, it is worth of giving it a try and decide yourself. First of all it looks absolutely beautifully, elegantly and cool (although it’s maybe “too much” for me already…). Besides similar functionality as two previously mentioned applications, surely, Picasa allows you to upload pictures to Picasa Web Albums if you have Google account and share them on the Internet with others. Obvious quality feature is image search – don’t forget it’s Google’s software ;)

Picasa is completely free and if you are interested or curious, download the program from picasa.google.com.

XnView

XnView is multilingual, cross-platform, popular, free image (and video) viewer, organizer and editor that supports huge amount of different image formats (reads more that 400 formats and saves in more than 50 formats). In fact this makes him stand up among competition. If you don’t like how XnView looks out of the box (like me), you might customize it and apply different skin. From basic editing functions to advanced filters and effects application there is almost nothing you can’t do with your pictures in this program.

If you prefer functionality against the look, download XnView from www.xnview.com.

That’s all from image viewers I consider worth of trying. If you have found or are using other free programs, don’t hesitate to write about them in comments!

Oliver Juhás 08.11.2009, 14:43 Software