High resolution photos from modern digital cameras are often too large to send by e-mail, or at least, take a long time to upload.

Sometimes, if you're in a hurry, you just want to get your photos sent off without worrying about whether it's going to attach or not. Imgares is a batch photo editor that allows you to reduce both size and e-mail or upload transfer times. All you have to is drag and drop your photos into the application window (as many as you want), change the size and click "Start" - there's not much too it beyond that. This makes it very limited on the one hand but also extremely quick on the other. After resizing however, the program does allow you to rotate photos, add text to them and even make a slideshow in movie format. The useful bit is that this can all be performed in "batch" processing mode so you can process, resize and label as many images as you want at once. If you do choose the slideshow function, there are several transitions you can apply such as Zoom In and Zoom Out, light effects and some rotation options.

This is one of the most basic photo editing applications you may ever use but for those who need large numbers of photos resized instantly, look no further.

Download Imgares 1.43 in Softonic

Adding a watermark is probably the best way to protect your online photos. It wont' stop people from using them, but at least they'll have your name on them wherever they go.

You can easily apply watermarks to your photos with Fast Watermark. The program doesn't require installation, so just unzip the contents of the file into any folder and you're good to go. Fast Watermark's interface has two main areas: one to design the watermark in itself and the other one to select the pictures you want to apply it to. The whole process is really easy and shouldn't take you more than a couple of minutes.

That said, the truth is that Fast Watermarks lacks certain options you find in other similar applications: for example, you can only use text (and not graphics). Also, there is no support for transparency effects or shadows. Finally, I didn't like the wat Fast Watermark handles images: it doesn't have a zoom tool and doesn't resize images properly either.

Fast Watermark is a quick, simple tool that enables you to add a watermark to your photos, but lacks some advanced tools you find in similar programs.

Download Fast Watermark 1.1 in Softonic

If you're a novice to photography or need to do your editing in a simple package on the move, then MobaPhoto may well be for you.

MobaPhoto encompasses everything from simple size reductions and contrast adjustments to uploading them to a website. In addition, it's got a very useful batch photo editing mode which allows you to change and edit several photos at once in various ways. This includes resize, crop, correct red-eyes and upload them with no FTP knowledge required. While this makes it very limited, it's excellent for beginners because it's so easy to use and lacks all the intimidating functions of your average imaging application. What's even more useful, especially for those on the move, is that it fits on a USB stick and requires no prior installation - just click and go. One problem you might find however is that although it supports most of the major image formats, all your changes are saved in JPG format which can be a bit annoying unless you use an image converter in conjunction with MobaPhoto - hopefully that's something they will add to future versions.

Extremely lightweight, easy to use and feature rich, MobaPhoto is an excellent addition for photographers on the move.

Download MobaPhoto 1.42 in Softonic

With WPanorama you can display panoramic pictures by letting them scroll horizontally or vertically on the screen. You can use this software to view the gorgeous 360° swiss panorama included with the program, the 413 panoramas available on the developer site or your own pictures in .jpg or .bmp format.

Download WPanorama 9.1.1 in Softonic

Most photo editors let you add text notations to your pictures, but if you don’t feel like fiddling with a complicated tool just to add some text, then use Digi-Annotator.

This simple photo app enables you to annotate photos in a very easy way. All you have to do is load a picture and use the program's context menu (by right clicking with your mouse) to add and edit any text string on the image. You can freely drag the text to any position on the picture, and also customize the text features: text font, size, color and other special effects. Also, Digi-Annotator includes a few basic editing tools to rotate, flip, sharpen or resample your photo.

On the downside, I found the program quite confusing to use. The only way to open an image is by dragging and dropping it on its interface. There are no standard menus or toolbars, only the context menu. And finally, I missed having a bit more options to customize my text: strokes, shadows, embossing and the likes.

With Digi-Annotator you can easily annotate any photo in just a few clicks, though I you want extended features you should look elsewhere.

Download Digi-Annotator 2.5 in Softonic

Adding water effects or ripple effects to videos is one of the coolest ways to give your videos an extra touch of class.

Sqirlz Water Reflections allows you to add rippling pools of water, rain or snow effects, to images or AVI videos. The pools can be any shape and you can define several factors such as the wave size, perspective and water transperency. You can also change the ripple shapes and wave details plus even add snowflake effects and add depth to other ripple effects. Unfortunately, there are not a large amount of output format options to choose from. Animations can be saved as Adobe Flash files, animated GIFS, AVI video clips and for images, bitmap, JPEG, PNG and TIFF files. The latest release has added some extra effects which are quite interesting which include general rainfall and glossy reflecting areas of water in cincentric circles. Some of the effects you can create are truly stunning - check out the developer homepage for a few examples - although it can take some time to render photos correctly, it's certainly wrth the effort.

If you want to impress friends with your photos or just have a very unique photos collection, Squirlz Water Reflections produces stunning results.

Download Sqirlz Water Reflections 2.4 in Softonic

If you've ever needed to resize an image quickly, then you need a tool that makes it as easy and as straight forward as possible.

VSO Image resizer organizes your photos by shrinking their resolution or reducing them on your hard drive. It's a one stop easy to use solution for all those that need to resize, compress, convert, create copies, import or organize photos. The main benefit of this is that the photos take up less storage space and are much easier to e-mail. You can also use them in third party applications much easier too such as design applications and other image editors. In addition, it's a good idea for webmasters to use this because reducing the resolution alone can mean that your webpages load much more quickly. You can change their format and also edit large numbers of image files at once as it supports batch editing. While the program doesn't have a particularly great interface, it is integrated very well into Windows shell so it's easy to access simply by right clicking.

If you're looking for a super quick and easy images resizing solution, then VSO will more than cater for your needs.

Download VSO Image Resizer 2.0.1.3 in Softonic

We've gotten used to the perfection of digital photography, but there was a time when photos had dust, scratches, stains and other imperfections that could easily ruin them.

Luckily you can now fix those imperfections with Retouch Pilot Lite, a really simple photo retouching tool that doesn't require any designing or editing skills and can therefore be used by anybody. This Lite version doesn't include the Smart Patch tool available in the trial, but other than that it's a perfectly working tool with which you can easily restore old photos.

That said, bear in mind that Retouch Pilot Lite works best with small flaws such as light scratches, spots and the likes. The more serious the defect is, the harder it'll be to fix it without leaving any trace. Also, I missed having a color picker when using the concealer; it was hard to choose the exact color to paint over certain artifacts in the photo to make them disappear.

Generally speaking, I found Retouch Pilot Lite to be a great retouching tool for newbies, and especially useful to remove small flaws from pictures without having to learn how to use Photoshop or any other mammoth-sized editor.

Retouch Pilot Lite is the perfect tool for a quick photo retouch to fix small spots. More serious imperfections definitely need more editing skills and a more professional tool as well.

Download Retouch Pilot Lite 3.0.2 in Softonic

Imagine spending the whole weekend taking lovely pictures of landscapes... only to arrive home and see that the skyline in some of them is completely tilted.

Don't worry, there's an easy way to fix it. Simply use Rotation Pilot and restore the horizon to its original position while keeping the same image quality as the original photo.

This is how it works: load the picture and draw a line with your mouse along the horizon (the tilted one, not the one you'd like to have). The program will automatically rotate the picture to the desired position. If there's any cropping or smoothing needed, you can also enable those options and let Rotation Pilot do the job, though the cropping will obviously affect the borders of the original photo. The program also includes rotating, resizing and mirroring options for further photo edition.

With Rotation Pilot you can easily fix visual slopes and tilted horizons in your digital photos.

Download Rotation Pilot 1.0.4 in Softonic

Multiple Image Resizer .NET is a batch image processor. The software was originally designed and built to batch resize images but now features a wider range of batch image processing functionality.

Take a look at what Multiple Image Resizer has to offer:

• Resize, rotate, flip or crop images
• Add borders or text to images
• Overlay watermarks
• Preview unprocessed and processed images
• Save and load image processing settings
• Customisable user interface
• Fully integrated help documentation

Download Multiple Image Resizer .NET 2.1.0.0 in Softonic

Like every magician, a computer artist needs a few tricks up his sleeve. Image processing offers some excelent opportunities for conjuring up such magic. The techniques* used by Dydelf will allow you to perform some digital prestidigitation on an oridinary image and transform it into an outlined posterized graphic with artistic flair.

Download Dydelf 1.02 in Softonic

Photo Gadget Pro is a shell extension that adds image editing options to Windows Explorer. It can rotate, resize and rename images, add a caption and/or frame and carry out format conversions. To use the program just select images to work with in Explorer's window, right click the selection and choose an action from the context menu.

When adding a caption you can choose between typing in text or using a graphics file. Framing is simple single or double outline where you set the width and colors. Multiple file rename mask is provided with several options including an automatic counter. If you have that kind of camera Photo Gadget Pro can also rotate images based on EXIF information.

Download Photo Gadget Pro 2.4 in Softonic

FotoSketcher is probably the fastest and easiest way to add a sketch effect to your pictures. Therefore it's perfect for those of you who don't dare use Photoshop yet and simply want to add some spice to your photos without much fuss.

FotoSketcher doesn't even require installation. Simply run the program and select the picture you want to sketch. The process will begin immediately, without having to press any button, and the result will be displayed side to side to the original picture, which is great for comparison. Also, the sketch effect can be done either in color or in black and white.

On the downside. FotoSketcher doesn't include any configuration features. It only allows you to tweak edge threshold and intensity by means of a couple of sliders, but I missed the possibility to adjust light, contrast and above all color, as the sketched pictures tended to be too lightly colored.

Apply a sketch effect to your photos in no time. No artistic skills required!

Download FotoSketcher 1.5 in Softonic

While advanced image editing tools such as Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are great for fine-tuning your photos and making sure they look gorgeous, not all of us have the time to tinker around with all the various palettes, tools and menus.

If you've got a bunch of digital photos that you quickly want to optimize then PicJet Studio could become your new best friend. The software comes with a range of tools that will automatically make adjustments to your pictures when you drag and drop them onto the corresponding tool's icon.

The editing tools in question are 'Collage', which automatically adds two images together when you drag them in; 'Converter', which transforms a picture from one format to another; a 'Stamp' tool for quickly adding text to an image: and a 'Resizer' to help you make an image fit to specified dimensions without any fuss.

PicJet performs all of these tasks remarkably quickly, and almost the instant you commit the file to be changed, the new version of it will appear in the save location. What I like about this process is that the app doesn't overwrite the original file. Instead it adds a tag onto the filename indicating what's been done (e.g. a file called 'image' would prompt a file called 'image_resize' to be created when resizing.

Ultimately this is a tool for performing very quick adjustments to files. There are only four adjustments you can make and you won't find any advanced editing tools or advanced effects in here.

But if you want a quick way to convert, resize, stamp or create collages from your images, PicJet does the job without any fuss - and for free!

Download PicJet Studio 2.6 in Softonic

Fotosizer is a freeware batch image resizer tool. It resizes your photos in just 3 easy steps - 1. Photo selection, 2. select resize settings, then 3. Start the resize!

Increasingly, sharing photos on the internet is becoming more and more popular. Photos, represented as JPEG files from digital cameras, taken at high resolutions are far too large to send over the Internet, with some photos ending up at 5 mega bytes. Uploading one photo to a photo sharing website is fine, but 10, 20, or even more, this can take forever, especially on a dial-up connection.

With Fotosizer, you can shrink JPEG image files, along with other supported formats, and dramatically reduce internet transfer times, enabling you to quickly and easily prepare your image collections to be published on the web

Download Fotosizer 1.16.0.249 in Softonic

With the number of blogs and personal webpages it's no longer only us, software reviewers, who need to resize many pictures on a daily basis. You probably need to resize a lot too, to send them by email, publish them online and many other possible usages.

This is where Squash comes in handy, enabling you to resize photos in batch mode, that is, many of them at the same time. The program, which doesn't even require installation, features a simple design and is very easy to use: simply open the photos you want to resize on its interface, select the new size, add a suffix if you want and you're done.

Of course, this simplicity of usage has also certain somewhat negative consequences: experienced users may miss having a few more options – at least to select the picture's new size, which only works in percentages. Also, the interface doesn't support dragging and dropping of images, something I personally found a bit of a shame.

If you're looking for a simple, quick way to resize photos, this may be the tool you need, though sometimes it seems it's just too simple even if it's only intended to resize pics.

Download Squash 0.3 in Softonic

The problem with many image editors is that they're large and cumbersome or they can0t edit batches of programs in one swoop.

This is not the case with GIMP which is an excellent batch processor for images and files that allows you to perform a whole host of functions with batch image processing in mind. If you need to manage a large number of photos and rename them all or at least change their location, then you'll certainly find some use for this program. One of the advantages is it allows batch processing of thumbnail resizing which allows you to specify a particular width or height or define fixed image dimensions. You can then superimpose text onto these thumbnails or photos (useful to stop copyright infringements). If you need your photos in a variety of formats, then you can also batch convert pictures to GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, MIFF, TIFF, PCX or TGA. Best of all, you're not restricted to one format at a time . you can select a whole bunch and then specify what format you want certain ones to change into. The icing on the cake is an FTP client which, while not exactly sophisticated (or particularly reliable in terms of maintaining connections), allows you to upload your photos to the net as quickly as possible directly from the application.

A very useful tool for anyone that has to process batches of photos at the same time or needs a very lightweight photo and thumbnail processor.

Download BIMP (Batch Image Processor) Lite 1.62 in Softonic

Photo! Editor, previously known as Photo Toolkit, is a basic retouching tool with which you can fix and optimize your digital images in a couple of clicks.

The most outstanding feature of this photo editing tool is its seamless integration with Windows Explorer, which means it adds a whole new command group to the image file context menus. These commands enable you to launch the program's main tools straight away, without having to open the program itself before.

As for the tools included in Photo! Editor, like I said it's a pretty basic program, that is, this is no free Photoshop. That said, the truth is that Photo! Editor works perfectly fine for small retouching tasks such as optimizing colors, removing red eye effect or even cleaning someone's skin from spots, smooth wrinkles and other slight imperfections. Other tools included are a resampling/cropping utility, some really cool light effects and a caricature tool to apply a hilarious morphing effect to your photos.

The only drawback I found in Photo! Editor is that there's no way to browse the folder's contents using thumbnails. This means that if your photo file names are not descriptive enough, you'll have to click on them one by one just to find out which picture they correspond to.

Photo! Editor is the perfect choice for those who are looking for a simple, lightweight and easy-to-use photo editing tool to fix their digital images.

Download Photo! Editor 1.0 Beta in Softonic

Digital cameras enable us to take better and better images but there are still some occasions when your shots need a bit retouching to reach perfection.

That's the case of noise or grain, a problem that can affect your photos when shooting them in poorly lighted environments. Luckily you can now remove those artifacts in a very easy way with Noiseware Community Edition, a photo retouching and editing tool that enables you to remove noise, grain and other imperfections from your pictures in just one click.

The program includes 10 noise filtering presets and allows you to tweak them but in a limited way, as some of the sliders are only available in a Pro version. After optimizing the image you can compare it to the original one by simply clicking on the photo. If you like it, go ahead and save it.

The program is a doddle to use, but the whole process gets a bit lengthy if you need to optimize many pictures, because you can't work in batches. Also, as another limitation of this version, you can't save pictures with a JPEG quality level higher than 90.

Noiseware Community Edition is a good tool to remove grain and noise from your pictures, as long as you don't have many of them to work on.

Download NoiseWare Community Edition 2.6 in Softonic

There are some tools that no everyday PC user should be without and VMN Toolbox brings together the most popular under one umbrella.

The program operates conveniently from a toolbar which sits quietly on your desktop in collapsed mode until you need it. Principally, these tools are a screen capture tool, a post-it note utility, colour picker, magnifier and a virtual ruler.

The screen capture tool is fairly simple allowing you to cut and paste images to your clipboard or save them to your hard drive. It is rather limited though when it comes to editing, resizing etc. The quick sticky notes tools removes the need to keep creating paper notes that can be easily lost. Again, it allows for simple writing and editing of notes but there's no reminder function or anything like that. The eye dropper allows you to select on any colour on your screen and replicate it exactly in other imaging applications. The palette allows you to choose from a 16-color, 65,000-color or web-safe palette and the colours can be managed in RGB or Hex format. Meanwhile the magnifier tool allows you to see all the details of any area of your screen in increments of 2x, 4x, 8x, and even 10x. it's a useful tool for those that have trouble reading web pages or graphic designers that need to ensure their images are exactly right. Finally, the virtual ruler allows for measuring of your screen, images or documents for pixel size - again, this is probably only useful for those involved in web design or that have to regularly upload images of a certain size.

This is an excellent set of tools that while not particularly advanced, are ideal for someone who needs some basic image management tools.

Download VMN Toolbox 4.1 in Softonic