Adobe Reader is the standard application needed for PDF viewing on the Windows platform. It has been in existence for over a decade now and has gone through various evolutions during this time. One result of this is that it has been increasingly loaded with plugins and extensions which mean that it's consistently criticised as being bloated and slow.

This is true to a certain extent although it still has much to offer. With this release, Adobe have addressed some of the speed issues and the memory footprint has been improved consistently throughout the development of version 8. The biggest problem with this program however is and continues to be security. It has too many features that most people do not need which not only slow it down but also leave it very vulnerable to attack. However, it does a very good job of allowing you to scroll through documents, jump to certain pages, copy text and print.

Adobe Reader is a well designed application that still performs effectively despite its size and will continue to be an essential application for producing documents.

Download Adobe Reader 9 in Softonic

PDF (Portable Document Format) is now one of the most ubiquitous document formats on the net. The problem is that Adobe Reader is the only tool to read it and it's both bulky and slow.

Foxit PDF Reader on the other hand is light and quick. The proof is in the pudding for starters - compare Foxit's installation file is only of just 2.2 MB against Acrobat's 20.8 MB and you can see why it opens documents in a snap. The key is that it doesn't have all those annoying splash-up screens, endless credits lists and plugins.

The program's interface been designed with ease of use in mind. You have several toolbars available, which you can show or hide at your will and which give you access to all the available utilities: zoom, text selection, image snapshot, search tool, rotation or full screen view, among others. There is a small ad in the upper right corner, but you can deactivate it by going to the View menu and deselecting the Advertisement option. One added bonus is that you can annotate PDF documents in several ways by highlighting text fragments, underlining them, strike them out or even add personal comments.

If you want a small, fast, stable and functional alternative to Adobe Reader, then look no further

Download Foxit Reader 2.3.2923 in Softonic

As the hard drives and Flash memory cards of the world’s burgeoning photography community continue to fill up, there is increasing demand for low-cost methods of keeping their images in some kind of order. With some snap-happy enthusiasts taking hundreds of pictures a week, there’s a danger that the fun of photography will be replaced by the mundane task of finding the shots you once they’re on your PC. While programs such as Photoshop Album and PaintShop Album are pretty good at helping you sort images, StudioLine aims to take things one stage further – by not charging you for the privilege.

You might expect that by not demanding a fee for a photo organizing program, you’d have to settle for a largely scaled-down version of its costly equivalents. We were pleasantly surprised to see this wasn’t the case, and the application is brimming with features that not only make it easier to sort and search for photos, but which can instantly improve the appearance of your images.

The main premise of the program is to help you whip your photo collection into some sort of order, and it does this admirably. You start with an Image Archive, which is basically a database where you can load in all of your images. From here, you can create a hierarchical tree system of folders based through an Explorer-style interface, making it a painless process. Sorting through your images is aided by the capacity for adding information about a photo using the ‘Descriptors’ data, photos, allowing you to categorize by image topic, date, location or person. You can even enter a star rating for each image to help you later in the sorting process. Another nice inclusion is the ability to change the size of thumbnail previews using a slider when viewing all the images within a folder.

As if the slick sorting facilities weren’t impressive enough, the program boasts a range of editing tools that rival many priced image editors. There’s a diverse variety of tools ranging from preprocessing, through photo correction, to special effects, all of which can be previewed and applied with ease. The fact that you can apply changes you’ve made to one photograph to hundreds of other images in one click is another major boon, and is ideal if you want to turn a batch of images into black and white, or apply an auto-colour correction to an entire album of photos, for instance.

The user interface is generally a joy to use, with lots of customizable options, and draggable palettes like those you see in professional editing suites. There are a couple of bothersome aspects of the interface which could do with changing though, such as the fact that an image loads in a new pop-up menu when its thumbnail is clicked on, rather than in the main window (as a tab perhaps). The tips boxes that spring up a little too frequently can also get a tad irritating, especially as there seems to be no way to permanently disable them.

Apart from these minor niggles, this is a fantastic program which, is arguably the cheapest way of effectively managing your image collection. The addition of features for creating slide shows, web galleries and emails only serves to raise its status as a serious contender to its big budget rivals.

Download StudioLine Photo Basic 3.50.4 in Softonic

Picasa is a lesson to the world in usability design. In less than five megabytes, this image organizer succeeds in being a completely rounded package with many editing tools that will satisfy part-timers and enthusiasts alike. However, what really makes Picasa stand out is the beautifully-executed interface, which proves a complete pleasure to use thanks to its speedy pace and some clever animations and fades.

Thanks to an initial image scan, you won’t ever have to go digging through your hard drive for last summer’s holiday snaps, and it will even order every picture you have chronologically, letting you quickly browse to any obscurely-named files in seconds. While Picasa can be used as a viewer, it has not been designed for that and so viewing should be left to another program such as the free FastStone Image Viewer. Where it does excel is in retouching your pictures with colour corrections and a few effects such as blur or film grain. Each edit can be done on the fly with an instant preview of the result and, of course, if something doesn’t quite work out, you can always go back via the undo button.

While these editing utilities cater for the majority of users’ needs, it would have made sense to include the ability to resize images, especially as Picasa includes features that make it easy to publish to the web in the form of a blog. You can also email any single or collection of images through Outlook or directly from Picasa if using your GMail account.

Some of the additional extras give this program a touch of class that you rarely find in Windows software, including the ability to make a collage from a set of images and a handy star rating system that lets you mark your favourite snaps and later single them out giving you the best of the best. Having been acquired by Google, Picasa is now freely available to the masses and is continually improving with each new iteration. With this in mind, it comes highly recommended for photography novices and pros, who have a significant number of images to organize on their PC.

Download Picasa 2.7.37.37 in Softonic

Those wishing to read PDF documents on their PCs now have an alternative choice when it comes to viewing these files - PDF-XChange Viewer. This PDF viewer is is smaller, faster and more feature-rich than other available readers.

You might be surprised just how quickly your large PDF files open and pages smoothly refresh as they are scrolled. So, why not speed up and improve your PDF viewing experience by downloading this viewer and trying it out?

In addition to all the standard functions here are some of the features available in the PDF-XChange FREE Viewer:

• Add comments and annotations to any PDF file
• Markup pages with text and objects
• Type directly on any PDF page
• Export PDF pages or entire files to BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PNG and more
• Extract text from a PDF page or file
• Make your navigation of large PDF files both simple and enjoyable with the Loupe and Pan tools

Download PDF-XChange Viewer 1.025 in Softonic

Windows Live includes a pack of beta services that Microsoft has made available for downloading. One of these utilities is Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is included in Vista as the standard photo viewer.

This app enables you to organize your photo collection, see it as a slideshow, use it as a screensaver and even optimize them with a set of basic editing tools such as red eye removal, brightness and contrast adjustment or image crop, amongst others.

After a somewhat garbled installation, you'll find that the program itself is very easy to use. The interface follows the typical Microsoft's design for some other tools of theirs, like Windows Media Player.

However, there are some issues that make it clear why this program is still in beta. It seems that Windows Live Photo Gallery has trouble when rendering thumbnails and sometimes uses the default icon instead of the actual photo. Also, I found the optimization tools quite clunky and their results not really that rewarding.

Download Windows Live Photo Gallery 12.0.1308.1023 in Softonic

This popular program, originally called Paint Shop Photo Album, is designed to help you make the most of your collection of digital photos. The smart and simple software automatically takes care of common photo tasks, including the process of downloading and organising, so you can focus on your photos, without worrying about where to put them.

What Photo Album 6 can do:

Manage your photo collection

Fast automatic downloads

Back it up

Intelligent memory

Create stunning collages

Free software and Xtras

Download Corel Photo Album 6.0 in Softonic

Those of us with digital cameras are spoilt for choice for when it comes to software and there are literally hundreds of programs that allow you to edit, manage and share your pictures. Let’s face it, most of the software that comes bundled with the camera is usually pretty limited, so it’s always worth hunting around for a third-party app to ensure your images are at their best. If you’re a Mac user then you really don’t need to look further than iPhoto, which comes thrown inbundled with most new systems these days and allows you to present your snaps in a number of unique ways. Windows users were bereft of such a decent built-in photo app until XP Media Center Edition 2005 came along, which introduced advanced slideshow features to XP.

Since then, Microsoft has refined the program in order to keep up with Apple’s iPhoto, resulting in this latest release, which promises much more than ever. Essentially a photo presentation tool, Photo Story lets you drag photos onto a window, arrange them as needed, then provide custom narration, transitions, zooms, pans, audio soundtracks and/or custom auto-generated music and then your WMV file is ready.

Applying such features can prove tricky in some programs, but not in Photo Story. The fact is, you don’t need to tweak a whole bunch of settings because the program does it for you, automatically generatinges transitions and , zoom/pans without you having to set it up yourself. What’s more, the ones generated by default look great.

While you can simply sit back and let the program do everything for you, there’s still plenty you can play around with if you’re feeling adventurous. For instance, you can build your own custom soundtracks for your slideshow. You can pick from a bumper range of music genres, tempos, instruments and effects, giving you the chance to match the audio precisely to the mood of your show.

Output from the SW isprogam is in Microsoft’s WMV files format and they compress more than straight MPEGs or other movie type files. You can choose from various resolutions in order to optimise your slideshow. Unfortunately, however, the output movies from the software are not as sharp as they’d be in VCD or DVD format. It’s also a shame that Photo Story doesn’t support burning DVDs and VCDs with the created slideshow, and you’ll need your own DVD authoring app to do this. There are applications, such as ProShow, that contain burning options and support for higher resolution output, but there’s not much that can match Photo Story in terms of its ease of use and automated features.

Download Microsoft Photo Story 3 in Softonic

As the hard drives and Flash memory cards of the world’s burgeoning photography community continue to fill up, there is increasing demand for low-cost methods of keeping their images in some kind of order. With some snap-happy enthusiasts taking hundreds of pictures a week, there’s a danger that the fun of photography will be replaced by the mundane task of finding the shots you once they’re on your PC. While programs such as Photoshop Album and PaintShop Album are pretty good at helping you sort images, StudioLine aims to take things one stage further – by not charging you for the privilege.

You might expect that by not demanding a fee for a photo organizing program, you’d have to settle for a largely scaled-down version of its costly equivalents. We were pleasantly surprised to see this wasn’t the case, and the application is brimming with features that not only make it easier to sort and search for photos, but which can instantly improve the appearance of your images.

The main premise of the program is to help you whip your photo collection into some sort of order, and it does this admirably. You start with an Image Archive, which is basically a database where you can load in all of your images. From here, you can create a hierarchical tree system of folders based through an Explorer-style interface, making it a painless process. Sorting through your images is aided by the capacity for adding information about a photo using the ‘Descriptors’ data, photos, allowing you to categorize by image topic, date, location or person. You can even enter a star rating for each image to help you later in the sorting process. Another nice inclusion is the ability to change the size of thumbnail previews using a slider when viewing all the images within a folder.

As if the slick sorting facilities weren’t impressive enough, the program boasts a range of editing tools that rival many priced image editors. There’s a diverse variety of tools ranging from preprocessing, through photo correction, to special effects, all of which can be previewed and applied with ease. The Classic version of StudioLine Photo comes with a raft of features that you don't get in Basic. These extra treats include a Timeline view that automatically organizes images by date, a star rating facility, and a neat image archive filter which significantly ramps up your picture hunting speed.

The user interface is generally a joy to use, with lots of customizable options, and draggable palettes like those you see in professional editing suites. There are a couple of bothersome aspects of the interface which could do with changing though, such as the fact that an image loads in a new pop-up menu when its thumbnail is clicked on, rather than in the main window (as a tab perhaps). The tips boxes that spring up a little too frequently can also get a tad irritating, especially as there seems to be no way to permanently disable them.

Apart from these minor niggles, this is a fantastic program which, is arguably the cheapest way of effectively managing your image collection. The addition of features for creating slide shows, web galleries and emails only serves to raise its status as a serious contender to its big budget rivals.

Download StudioLine Photo Classic 3.50.10 in Softonic

One of the worst problems with Adobe's Acrobat reader is that it often takes about a week to load PDFs. OK, maybe not quite that long, but it is very slow.

SumatraPDF is one of several apps knocking around that are designed to simplify your PDF viewing - and it doesn't do a bad job either. Opening files in the program is virtually as quick as opening and closing your eyes and it doesn't take a genius to find your way around the interface.

Options are a little thin on the ground but SumatraPDF provides a very comfortable environment for reading PDFs and you can print documents without much hassle. Give me this over Acrobat any day for looking at eBooks.

Download Sumatra PDF 0.9 in Softonic

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition provides a chronological and clear overview of your photos collection. Aside from this, the software offer fundamental picture correcting functions, works at the push of a button, displays slide-shows and sends photos by e-mail to friends and acquaintances.

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition avoids the need for the use of incomprehensible filter and correction tools. Rather, the Adobe developers have concentrated on click functions. The drawback of this is that those who want more control over photo editing and manipulation will be disappointed.

The upside is that it's very fast. In a few clicks, you can remove red-eye, bad lighting or remove annoying objects. Once finished, edited photos can be sent directly from the program by E-Mail or to mobile telephones and of course, printers. Alternatively, you can also connect to Adobe's own on-line photo services which can send you hard copies of your prints.

Download Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.2 in Softonic

XnView, simply put, is a file explorer. What makes it a bit special is that instead of treating every file as equal, it tries to make sense of each and every one and let you see, in the most relevant form possible, what exactly is contained in the file.

When checking this program out, we were immediately reminded of another quality file previewer, ACDSee. While that has gone on to become a fully featured photo manager, available for $50, XnView will take care of most users’ basic needs while boasting a price tag of $0 (for personal use). With its built-in preview engine, the program can display 400 different image file formats as well as play various media formats such as AVI or MP3.

Using the program will already be second nature to most users as it works like Windows Explorer. On the left side of the screen you see all your directories, with the contents of the directories being displayed in the upper half of the right window. Selecting any of these files will then bring up a preview in the lower half of the window. If you’re browsing through some photos you can run them as a slideshow and view in full screen. If you’re browsing through simple TXT or INI files, the opening few lines of text will show up as an icon and you can view the entire contents of the file without needing to open other programs.

There is a good level of support for various formats and the interface zips along without delays, even when displaying large video files. On encountering a file that it doesn’t recognize, XnView displays its hash values, which may or may not be of use. If you run into any difficulty, there is a help file that is sufficient but not overwhelming.

One aspect that wasn’t quite as we would have liked was that it didn’t recognize the native format of files. For example, a simple text file with a LOG extension wasn’t treated as the same file with a TXT extension. It’s a small inconvenience but does stand out because of the general high quality of the software. For anyone with a large number of files that they want to organize, convert or just browse, XnView is certainly worth a look.

Download XnView 1.94.2 in Softonic

ACDSee is the kind of application that has been around for years, launching version after version. It began as a fast, simple image viewer and has now evolved into a heavyweight program with lots of tools, which is exactly what ACDSee has been criticised for. In any case, let's take a closer look and see what lies behind this classic image viewer.

Firstly, you must go through a quite lengthy installation process, which involves providing an email address to unlock the trial if you want to use it during 30 days instead of the 7 allowed by default. The installation also includes the Yahoo! Toolbar but fortunately you can skip if you don't want it on your web browser.

ACDSee features a quite cluttered interface which is divided into several windows: the directory tree structure on the left, the selected folder's contents in the central pane and a handy options menu on the right to categorize and rate your pictures. The first time you launch the program, it automatically scans your hard drive in search of images, a process that may take a while if you're a photo junkie and your hard drive looks like an offline Flickr.

As for organizing photos, ACDSee includes an interesting set of tools that allows you to classify images according to categories (which you can create yourself), ratings and the so-called "auto categories", based on the image's EXIF data. There's also a nice search tool with which you can find any photo on your hard drive in just a few seconds, simply by entering the first few letters of the file's name. We found this quite handy, as well as the Help system, which seems fairly complete.

As we said before, ACDSee has been criticised for becoming too bloated with unnecessary extra options. However, you can still find useful tools in the edition menu or the create menu. The first one gathers a bunch of basic photo editing utilities such as rotate, flip, resize, crop, red-eye fix, etc. whilst the second one allows you to create a wide range of personal projects with your photos, including slideshows, PDF documents, photo CD's or DVD's and HTML albums.

Summing up, ACDSee used to be the standard image viewer but in the last few years it has been clearly overtaken by other programs which, in spite of being simpler, often end up being the user's choice. In the end, when all you want to do is viewing photos, you don't need anything else.

Download ACDSee Photo Manager 9.0.108 in Softonic

Our constantly growing photo collections are no longer manageable with a simple file explorer. We need a comprehensive photo manager that enables us to browse, categorize, back up and preview our pictures in an easy way. In other words, we need something like Magix Photo Manager.

This massive application takes care of your photo collection, no matter how big it is. It even includes an SQL server to create a fully functional database that can be searched with standard operators. But besides the management tools, the program also allows you to view photos as a slideshow, create photo albums, generate screensaver with your favourite shots or create a backup copy of your pictures on CD or DVD, to name a few. It also includes some basic editing tools, but no configuration options. That is, if you want to apply a given filter, you either apply it or not; there are no settings.

Magix Photo Manager is certainly a very complete application, but I had the impression it lacked speed, freshness, even ease of use. The program tries to cover so many aspects (managing, editing, backing up and so on) that ends up being cluttered and confusing.

A comprehensive photo manager with support for databases, editing tools, backup utilities and more.

Download MAGIX Xtreme Photo & Video Manager 2007 4.21 in Softonic

Kodak Easyshare is a digital photo organizer which gives you access to your Kodak Gallery and make use of Kodak's project and print services.

You'll find it offers what you expect of a digital photo organizer, such as being able to save your photos in albums and show them in calendar view, adding tags, easy transferring from your camera and sharing them with others via email or burning on a CD. You can also create a little slideshow to view albums in full screen.

I did find the application a little counter-intuitive, partly due to the color of the interface, which makes it difficult to set buttons apart. A simple action like adding an album, wasn't easy as it should be.

Although limited, the range of editing tools available was OK. You can enhance your picture, set the balance and add a few effects to make a little snazzier. Both the tips and online guide provided by Kodak are thorough.

You can use Kodak Easyshare without actually having a Kodak account, however you'll find many places in the application where it encourages you to do so. Your use of the application will also obviously be limited if you don't have one as you won't be able to print photos or create projects.

Kodak Easyshare is a digital photo manager, that gives access to Kodak services online.

Download Kodak Easyshare 7.0 in Softonic

With an ever growing collection of digital photos, many computer users are in search of an appropriate tool to manage them.

Photo Manager 2008 can be the answer to this search. This complete application works as a photo manager, viewer and editor, plus including some extra tools to make the most of your photo collection.

The program features a classic interface divided into several areas that contain your system's folder structure, image preview and a task list. You can view your photos in thumbnail lists or full screen, apply a series of basic edition effects, create an HTML photo album to share your pictures online, see and edit EXIF data in each image, print several photos on a single sheet of paper and find duplicate images, among other possibilities.

Despite the array of tools included, Photo Manager 2008 generally falls short of expectations. Its editing capabilities are a bit limited – at least when compared to other similar programs – and it also lacks functionalities that you can easily find in other photo editors.

Photo Manager 2008 is a photo editor and viewer with which you can organize, view and edit your pictures, though it lacks advanced tools you find in other similar apps.

Download Photo Manager 2008 1.0 in Softonic

XnView Portable is, put simply, a file explorer that has been especially adapted for image files and is developed to be run from a USB key.

XnView Portable features the same design and the same tools as its older brother XnView, which makes it a really convenient photo editor that you can carry anywhere with you. It has support for a few hundred different graphic formats as well as other media files such as AVI and MP3.

The interface in XnView Portable is divided into two sections: the left pane shows the folder structure, while the right one is where the contents of the selected folder are displayer. A double click on any image is enough to open it in full screen and work on it with the program's set of tools. XnView Portable is obviously no Photoshop, but you'll be able to do some cropping and resizing, adjust brightness, correct red eyes and other basic editing and retouching tasks.

If XnView is your favorite resident image viewer, now you can take it anywhere with you thanks to XnView Portable.

Download XnView Portable 1.94.2 in Softonic

View images in countless formats, and apply a variety of effects with this small, fast, and powerful application. Dimin Viewer incorporates unique visualization ideas, like Panoramic Photographs Tool and Big Image Navigator. It also features multi language interface to feel yourself at home!

Take a look at what this program can do for you:

• Thumbnail view with cache
• Easy Read/Write multi-page images e.g. TIFF, GIF
• Multi-monitor support, full screen monitor selection
• Skin support
• Smart sorting methods for Play List and Thumbnails
• Slide show with different effects
• Multi folder file manager tool, very convenient for fast image organizing
• Batch conversion and file rename tools
• Advanced filter scripting
• Advanced zoom tool allows perform most common operations using only your mouse Zoom, Hand move, Walk on Play List, etc.
• Really cool modern user interface naturally blending with Windows XP and Windows Vista
• Supports many image formats, including popular such as: JPEG, GIF, TIFF, JPEG-2000, also supports many Digital Cameras RAW formats and provides RAW image size guessing function
• Advanced Metadata support, including EXIF, IPTC, GeoTIFF, GeoJPEG-2000, Fluoview TIFF, etc. Embedded IPTC viewer/editor, read/write support for EXIF, GeoTIFF and GeoJPEG2000, cross conversions and enhanced metadata preview

Download Dimin Viewer n5 5.2.5 in Softonic

With the increasing popularity of digital cameras, the need for programs that help us share our pictures is also growing. As digital photos cannot be stuck onto the pages of traditional albums, the perfect solution is creating a digital album, something you can do very easily with MemoriesOnTV. Even if you're not the computer-savvy type, you'll find yourself very comfortable when using this application and the results are really attractive.

MemoriesOnTV divides the process of creating a digital photo album into five easy steps, represented in the menu bar located between both panes: import, music, effects, menu and burn. To begin with, simply drag and drop files from the bottom pane onto the top one to add content to your photo album. The only downside would be the fact that you cannot resize the bottom pane, so if you have a large directory structure you're going to be scrolling a lot. After choosing pictures, you can work on selected photos individually: double click on any of them and the photo will be displayed in a separate window, along with a complete editing menu. You'll be able to fix colors and brightness, add a caption, change background color or apply any of the many special effects featured in the program. You may move to the next photo and continue working this way. However, unless you want to personalize every single detail of every single image it's not really worth it, as it's going to take a huge amount of time. Besides, the program can do it automatically! Just keep on reading and we'll show you.

The next step in the process consists of adding a soundtrack to your album. You'll be able to choose the music files you want to use in your project by just dragging and dropping them on the program's interface or clicking on the button with the plus sign. Don't worry about calculating the song's length; MemoriesOnTV features an excellent sync tool that will adjust the duration of both music and photos, making them fit perfectly.

Now it's time to add special effects to your pictures. This is where you can set the program to choose the effects for you (if you select the "random" option) and also apply them automatically to all pictures, instead of having to edit them one by one. You can choose both photo effects and transition effects. The amount of options available for each of them is certainly gorgeous.

The last step before actually finishing the project is choosing a menu template, that is, the image you will see when viewing your photo album on your PC or TV. Once again, you have a wide range of options to choose from, though the preview pane is so narrow they're hard to see. Fortunately, you have the possibility to preview the whole project as you work your way through the different steps. Once you've created the menu screen, end your project by saving it as a video file or burning it to a disc directly from the application itself.

MemoriesOnTV is definitely one of the best choices to create digital photo albums for novice users as it doesn't require any special knowledge. You'll be amazed to see how well your pictures look on your TV, with the appropriate background music and some smashing visual effects.

Download MemoriesOnTV 4.1.0 in Softonic

Free DWG Viewer will open native DWG, DXF, and DWF files for viewing, along with accompanying Xref files. It will also open Informative Graphics' own "content sealed" (CSF) file format, which is generated by the company's Net-It publishing products and featuring Visual Rights security options for file content. The DWG viewer also supports IGC's legacy formats from previous versions of Brava! and MYRIAD.

Based on ActiveX, IGC's Free DWG Viewer serves as a stand-alone desktop application, or an ActiveX control that can be invoked from a specified application, such as Internet Explorer. Printing and markup functions are available in IGC's fee-based viewing products. For a full-featured viewer, IGC recommends it's MYRIAD 2D/3D desktop viewing software. View native AutoCAD r12 to 2005 files.

Download Free DWG Viewer 1.0 in Softonic