Photo downloading and munipulation?

Irfanview has been my choice for a long time, but after I got a game cam I switched over to FastStone. FSViewer allows basic editing (color correction, resize, brightness, crop, etc.) very similar to Irfanview.

The features that I like better are the thumbnail viewer and the batch processing. The FSViewer allows viewing thumbnails and a single enlargement in the same window pane while Irfanview requires some window hopping. And you can also view enlarged sections of a photo and you can compare multiple photos side by side - as you pan across one photo the others selected pan in sequence with it.

FSViewer also is a bit easier to use for batch operations.

It is free for home & educational use but a paid license is required for commercial use.

Paint

Just for information purposes -- Photoshop (Adobe) the mother of many Pro Photographers recently began a "monthly subscription" service for its photo programs - a most unfortunate development in my opinion. It requires a user to continue paying the monthly fee, or lose the ability to process images.

Soon, we will not be able to buy the Adobe programs, but only use it with a monthly code. I expect some of the other pay photo services will go that route soon if it proves beneficial to Adobe ... then, photo processing programs will own you/us for life.

Some basic programs may remain free with a camera (we hope so) but it seems to become a wave of the future to anchor a user into a monthly fee rather than buy a program and use it. A $110 program in the past will become $10 a month forever, so after a year ($120), the program becomes pure profit and user cost.

Not so sure it benefits the casual user to sign up, even though improvements become a part of the monthly fee, most do not use anywhere near the potential in programs.

So a word of advice -- if you own a photo program of any kind, save it, keep it, treasure it. We may not get another chance.

Do you also have a camera? All Camera's came with editing software.Just pull out the disk for it and install it on your new computer.

I'm using the editing software from my old Olympus camera I threw away 10 years ago! Free, already on my computer and has WAY more different editing functions than most free on line does.

And on line editing won't take a 2,000 x 2,000 pixle picture to resize. You need to resize them on your computer off line.

I use MICROSOFT OFFICE PICTURE MANAGER and PAINT for most of my general size setting and photo quality settings... This two photo programs are already provided on your hard drive setups.

PAINT is my default program to use my ALT PRT SCREEN keys to capture any photo I am looking at on-line and then I can edit this full screen page and add to this photo with comments and arrows etc to show something of interest to the forums I am in discussing things. Works great with my GOOGLE MAP SEARCH engine where you can zoom down and view things like camp grounds and wild back roads using street views etc...

If I need to do permanent special things to my photos I use COREL PAINT SHOP PRO which is a paid program which has been my favorite PHOTO SHOP program over the years... I will upgrade it to a more current version program about every three years

Picasa Photo manager is another great FREE program to use but it likes to find every photo on your hard drive and makes it available in literally hundreds of windows on the bottom of your screen. I found this abit overcoming for me haha... I can probably change all of that and use the program like I do my others photo programs for managing smaller groups.

When you go to the PICTURE ALBUMS folder just right click on the photo in question and select 'OPEN WITH' and you will find several general purpose photo programs already available on your computer to use...

You may not need to purchase anything new to edit your photos.

I use alot of my photos as screen savers and have them grouped in different folders to use based on my mood. I have a pretty good selection now of STARY NIGHT PICTUREs of stars and low lighted coastal views showing distant towns with stary nights... These darker photos works best with my few FOLDER LINKS on my main screen... I am setup here like WINDOWS 7 on my WIN10 computers... Could never get used to all of the screen full of small windows to click on for the different things to do... I mostly use GOOGLE CHROME or FIREFOX browsers here with things setup in tabs bookmarks to use.

I will use Microsoft Office Picture Manager to re-size and rename these photos to give my the correct size and fit for my specific monitors...

I never do much to the original photos I download and keep them in-tact so I can go back to them if needed. Current day very large TB hard drives makes all of this possible...

You will find out pretty soon you can always go smaller in size setting but once this has been saved you don't have much luck going back up in size and pixels... Most often you have to go back to the original and start your photo work all over again...

Roy Ken

Picasa - again.
Easy and versatile.

BobKrogstie wrote:
Picasa

X2 I am not the best computer person but I can get things done with Picasa.

Picasa

There are several photo editing programs on-line for free. But I have found for simple editing, "Paint" is still pretty good and fairly simple. I use "Paint" mostly to resize, or crop something out of an existing image and let you save in a variety of formats. Works well, simple and comes with your computer.

If you want a paid application, there's always good old "Photo Shop".

I have been using IrvanView for years
If you want to resize or crop pictures it's excellent and simple to use

Transferring pictures is a simple copy/paste in Windows or even drag and drop