The Windows Live Photo Gallery interface itself is clean, clear and easy to use. It provides a great platform for your images and the picture quality in the slideshow function is excellent. Windows Live Photo Gallery also features great tagging and sorting functions and a few nice extras, such as the ability to order prints directly from online retailers, burn to CD and publish to a group.

Unfortunately, many of these extras require you to install a supplementary program or sign up for a Windows Live account. Add that to Windows Live Photo Gallery's simplistic editing tools, and suddenly the program isn't looking so rosy.

In fact, Windows Live Photo Gallery even appears to have lost a few features since the last version, as there is no sign of the screensaver function of the beta version and you can only make thumbnails that measure 100 x 75 - not exactly what I'd call progress, Windows!

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a good program for heavy Windows Live users who don't need much editing power.

Download Windows Live Photo Gallery 14.0.8081.709 in Softonic

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 with StudioLine Photo. We were pleasantly surprised to see this wasn’t the case with StudioLine Photo, 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 StudioLine Photo 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 with StudioLine Photo, 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 in StudioLine Photo 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 StudioLine Photo's slick sorting facilities weren’t impressive enough, StudioLine Photo boasts a range of editing tools that rival many priced image editors. There’s a diverse variety of tools in StudioLine Photo 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 with StudioLine Photo is another major boon, and is ideal if you want to turn a batch of images into black and white, or apply an auto-color correction to an entire album of photos, for instance.

The StudioLine Photo 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 StudioLine Photo 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 in StudioLine Photo 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, StudioLine Photo 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 StudioLine Photo's status as a serious contender to its big budget rivals.

Download StudioLine Photo Basic 3.70.37.0 in Softonic

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

I've always been fascinated with those weird pictures where inside the picture is a picture of the picture and inside that there's a picture of that picture and inside that there's a picture of that picture and...well, you get the point.

Perpetual works along a similar brain-boggling principal. You start off with an image which is completely composed of a series of other smaller images put together. Perpetual invites you to zoom into the image, whereupon you discover that these smaller images are also made up of lots of other smaller images themselves. Zoom through these and guess what? Yep, more smaller images are revealed.

It's really quite fascinating and the process of zooming down infinitely through all the pictures is strangely hypnotic. There are hundreds of different pictures included in Perpetual to make up this kaleidoscope of weirdness, ranging from the Crazy Frog, to nature scenes, to graphic designs to naked girls.

You can zoom manually, or allow the program to auto-zoom, though if you zoom manually, you get the benefit of being able to move around the image and choose a point to focus in on. The only thing I would've liked in Perpetual would be the ability to zoom out.

It doesn't serve much of a purpose, but Perpetual is certainly a captivating way of wasting some time.

Download Perpetual 0.3 in Softonic

A full-featured photo suite, Ashampoo Photo Commander doesn't just let you browse your photo collection, it also lets you view a full-screen slideshow, optimize images that need slight retouching, and use your favorite shots to create slideshows, albums, collages, cards, calendars and more. Ashampoo Photo Commander also includes a handful of filters and special effects to create original or artistic versions of your photos, such as sepia, pencil drawing, or oil painting.

The interface in Ashampoo Photo Commander is divided into several tabs, each one of them serving a different purpose. You can browse images, apply a quick fix, editing, do something creative with selected photos and organize your collection in a more effective way with the Ashampoo Photo Commander batch processing tools.

Generally speaking, Ashampoo Photo Commander includes an impressive array of photo-oriented tools that let you make the most of your photo collection. In its ninth reincarnation, the program seems to have fixed its instability issues and runs a whole lot faster than version 8.

Ahampoo Photo Commander is a comprehensive photo suite that lets you manage, view, optimize and get creative with your pictures.

Download Ashampoo Photo Commander 9.4.2 in Softonic

This pack of plug-ins is directly saved into the program's installation folder. They enable you to play and view more formats in IrfanView, such as video files, audio CD and even MP3 files, plus a plethora of image formats you usually don't find in other photo viewers.

IrfanView PlugIns also brings new extra features to the program, like the ability to create a photo slideshow, add new effects to your images or integrate burning functionality from Nero.

IrfanView PlugIns are very easy to install. Simply follow the on-screen instructions and if you've installed IrfanView in the program's default directory, you won't have to configure or tweak anything.

Expand the capabilities of IrfanView with the IrfanView PlugIns pack!

Download IrfanView PlugIns 4.30 in Softonic

Nothing's more frustrating than taking a picture, uploading it to your computer and subsequently discovering you can't view the file format it uploaded as. FastPictureViewer Codec Pack can help solve that issue.

As the name suggests, you can view a variety of different image formats with FastPictureViewer. In addition, FastPictureViewer Codec Pack offers support for viewing different types of image formats in Windows Explorer, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Photo Viewer, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player 12. There's also full 64-bit compatibility.

In addition, FastPictureViewer Codec Pack supports raw formats from well over 350 different models of the most popular digital cameras on the market currently. It even offers support for special image formats like OpenEXR, HDR, and TGA, among others.

FastPictureViewer Codec Pack also lets you view EXIF metadata within Windows Explorer.

If you want to view lots of different image formats on your PC, FastPictureViewer Codec Pack will most likely be an indispensable aid.

Download FastPictureViewer Codec Pack 3.2 in Softonic

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 3.60 in Softonic

MiView is a free open source program which displays DICOM, ACR, NEMA and PAPYRUS, formats.
The main aim of MIView is to provide a platform that allows you to view any kind of medical image and perform basic manipulation of them. The program does require a decent graphics card because it has to handle images that support multiple shading depths plus it needs to be able to render images render images in real time. To be honest, unless you are needing to view XRays or technical medical documents, you won't really find much use for this viewer as simple and effective as it is. It's also prone to several bugs including some images do not display properly (by the developer's own admission) and the "Multislice" view does not work correctly. In addition, it's known that the viewing area is transparent upon initial startup on some ATI cards.

Nevertheless, if you're a medical professional on a budget, this could be the viewer you've been looking for.

Download MiView 0.6.254 in Softonic

Exif Pilot allows you to read the information contained within EXIF photos taken with a digital camera including such things as the date and time the photos was taken, the exposure time, the EXIF version that was used, shutter speed, flash use and even focal length. Using it is as simple as using any file browser such as Explorer - just select a folder with images in the Folders panel, choose some files to use in the files table and you can read all the information you need instantly in the properties panel. If you only want to view those photos with Exif data, then you can always sort photos by clicking on the EXIF column title in the files table and it shuffles them immediately. Unfortunately, previewing your photo is not particularly well taken care of as the preview Window is very small - you may be better to use a third party application to see exactly what your image looks like. What should happen is that by reviewing the EXIF data however, you'll learn under what conditions and focus you are producing your best pictures. Note that in this free version, you can't edit the EXIF data - only view it.

For serious photographers or amateur photographers who seriously want to improve their photo skills, EXIF Pilot Light is a simple but highly useful tool.

Download Exif Pilot Lite 4.4 in Softonic

With FlickrEdit you can browse your images, Favorites and uploads from your contacts without having to launch the browser, open the URL and start your session each time. The first time you launch FlickrEdit though you need to create a new user - which you can do by simply logging on to your Flickr account and authorizing the app in Flickr settings. After that, you can simply close the browser and start using FlickrEdit.

FlickrEdit lets you browse photos and sets, view photo slideshows, check your contacts' latest uploads, download and upload photos, see the EXIF data about each picture, mark them as favorites and many other tasks. It also works great as a backup tool for Flickr images. Still, there are some features missing, such as a search tool (the one built in the program only searches your photos) and the ability to leave notes.

Being a Java tool, FlickrEdit is not very quick in response and sometimes takes a while to display photos. That said, we found it to be a very handy tool, especially for Flickr hardcore users.

If you spend a lot of time browsing, managing, uploading and viewing photos on Flickr, this tool may come in really handy for you.

Download FlickrEdit 1.1.2 in Softonic