You probably know GIMP already, but now if you have a USB memory device you can take it anywhere with you thanks to Portable GIMP.

The Portable GIMP is a special version of the well-known open source image editing software that has been specifically developed for portable memory devices. The whole installation program and its plug-ins have been packaged to fit your USB stick, so that you can work on your images no matter in which computer you are.

Portable GIMP includes all the graphic editing tools any serious designer or photo editor could ask for. It's true that it takes a while to master the program's interface – especially for those who are not used to multiple-window working environments – but once you get the hang of it Portable GIMP enables you to do pretty much anything you want with your images.

With Portable GIMP you'll have the original GIMP's resources and tools always at hand.

Download Portable GIMP 2.4.7 in Softonic

Photo Crop Editor is an Interactive Photo Editor software for selecting and removing an object in a picture or photograph from its background.

The user can then compose the result on a different background to create a new scene. Interactive Photo Editor works even if foreground and background colors are similar.

Download iFoxSoft Photo Crop Editor 1.15 in Softonic

Slideshows are one of the best ways to add colour and life to a photo collection no matter what the subject matter is.

Slideshow Magic is aimed at both home users and business professionals who want to impress friends or colleagues with their photo slideshow creations. Best of all, it doesn't require the viewer to have the program installed as all slideshows can be saved in any QuickTime compatible format.

The easy to use interface is somewhat like that of a video editor allowing you to add music or audio tracks either for the whole slideshow or just specific segments. You can add some impressive transitions and titles much in the same way as you do with Windows Movie Maker for example. The program also features a useful guide to help you get your photos online or burnt to DVD. However, unfortunately the program doesn't provide either it's own webspace or burner for uploading and saving photos. For uploading, you'll need an FTP client and web host and for burning, a third party burner such as Nero.

In addition, although it's a cross platform application, sharing with other platforms requires some form of network solution between clients (although this needn't be something complicated - a program like MSN Live Messenger is enough

Slideshow Magic is a relatively cheap but powerful way to get your photos either online or burnt to DVD.

Download Slideshow Magic 5.0.5 in Softonic

Making your own icons is a cool way to add a touch of class to your desktop without adding any widgets or changing the theme.

Easy Picture2Icon allows you to create snappy and customised Windows icons based on your favourite images and designs. So for example, if you have a favourite photo, Easy Picture2Icon can simply process it and turn it instantly into an icon you can use on your desktop. It doesn't accept all file types but at the moment, Easy Picture2Icon is able to convert digital pictures into BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPG and PNG files to Windows icons (ICO).

However, that's as far as it goes because Easy Picture2Icon then allows you to use your favourite graphical editor to retouch and add your own special effects to icons. Easy Picture2Icon does however allow you to make transparent icons and you can choose which color to make transparent.

Easy Picture2Icon is a great way to get started creating your own icons although it's a shame it doesn't come bundled with a more comprehensive editor.

Download Easy Picture2Icon 2.5 in Softonic

Zoundry Raven is our a flexible WYSIWYG blog editor that allows you to edit blogs on a wide range of platforms.

The feel of Zoundry Raven is something like that of a word processor except you can add links, tags, photos, music and video files and publish directly to major platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress. The Zoundry Raven editor is WYSIWYG meaning that you know exactly how it's going to look before anything is published.

In addition, you can use tabs in Zoundry Raven to separate multiple blogs. So for instance, you can have one tab for your Blogger blog and one for your Wordpress blog. There's also a useful indexer which links to every blog post you've ever written making it easy to manage your posts. There's no need to even install Zoundry Raven on your hard drive - you can run it from a USB stick.

Zoundry Raven is a brilliant blogging application which makes updating and managing blogs on different platforms insanely easy.

Download Zoundry Raven 0.9.360 Beta in Softonic

If you've got a few special photos that you intend to blow up or use for something important, it's always a good idea to retouch them slightly to optimise their appearance.

If you do this with Photoshop, then expect a steep learning curve because you'll be fiddling around for hours with filters and other industry standard enhancement tools. However, if you're looking for something that can do the job with the minimum of fuss and ease of use, then you should take a look at Lightbox Free Image Editor.

Lightbox Free Image Editor is a bit of an ugly duckling interface wise - the developers have clearly opted for substance over style but it's surprisingly effective at what it does. The main control Lightbox Free Image Editor gives you is over brightness, shadows, color and saturation of images. These can play a crucial part in ensuring your image looks it's best but finding the right combination can be trial and error. However, you can use Lightbox Free Image Editor "Auto Balance" and "Smart Fill Light Options" to automatically see if Lightbox Free Image Editor can do a decent job itself.

If it's red eye you need to remove, Lightbox Free Image Editor automatically takes care of it (with mixed levels of success) and it can also add borders to your images and trim fuzzy edges or annoying objects in photos.

Lightbox Free Image Editor is a simple solution for photo editors that's particularly useful when it comes to balancing light problems.

Download LightBox Free Image Editor 1.20 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

Publishing photos to the web has to be one of the biggest areas of software development but many fall short of the mark in terms of usability and speed of use.

Photo! Web Album offers and easy way to create photo galleries for the web with an emphasis on being user friendly and usable. This makes Photo! Web Album ideal for beginners who aren't looking for anything that looks great but works quickly and in a straightforward manner. From the moment of installation of Photo! Web Album, you're asked how you would like to post your photos to the web via a built-in wizard which makes it simple to use.

There's no need to worry about hosting either - Photo! Web Album allows you to share your photo albums on the developer's own website although how much space you've got here is not clear but it's likely it's not particularly generous. What's nice though is that by using the Photo! Web Album service, you can edit your photo presentation and online creations from the Photo! Web Album desktop interface. All changes are made in realtime so there's no waiting around for the server to catch up with edits you make. Photo! Web Album also lets you add subfolders of photos related to another subject which means that it's actually a better way to organise your photos than even Picassa.

Basic photo editor, uploader and hosting in one, Photo! Web Album is a competitive solution for novices or those new to photo uploading.

Download Photo! Web Album 1.1 in Softonic

The simplest way to breathe new life into your desktop is to give it a decent wallpaper but even a static paper can get boring after a while.

Adolix Wallpaper Changer is a free tool which helps configure your desktop wallpaper easily to change automatically. You can use any image as long as it's in JPG, GIF, PNG or BMP format. Adolix Wallpaper Changer comes with a simple and intuitive control panel to customize your desktop wallpaper allowing you to change the size, position, transition style and other little tweaks.

The Adolix Wallpaper Changer control panel itself is user friendly and there's not much to it. One particularly useful feature in Adolix Wallpaper Changer is a "playlist" editor which allows you to create playlists for your wallpapers in much the same way as you would for a music application. This is great depending on your mood or who is using the computer allowing you to set up different profiles for each. The time period of changes in Adolix Wallpaper Changer is entirely up to you and you can add a few snazzy background images for your photos. In Adolix Wallpaper Changer, everything can also be controlled from a system tray icon rather than having to go through your control panel.

A free and easy way to freshen up your desktop, Animate Adolix Wallpaper Changer will make the best of your photo collection.

Download Adolix Wallpaper Changer 2.2 in Softonic

Massive photo editing tools like Photoshop are great, but some find them too heavy and complicated for everyday usage.

PicPick is definitely a better choice if what you need is just a simple image editor. With PicPick you can easily perform simple editing tasks to your photos, including brightness, contrast and color adjustment, grayscale, blur, pixelate and other special effects. There's also a cool whiteboard feature which enables you to write and draw directly on the screen.

But PicPick is not only an image editor: it's also a full featured screen capturing tool with which you can capture the image on your monitor in several ways: full screen, active window, user-defined area and more. Plus, PicPick can work with several documents simultaneously and captures can be triggered with customizable keyboard shortcuts, which makes it even handier.

I liked the versatility of PicPick, as well as the fact that it doesn't require installation. On the downside, I missed certain features such as support for printing or the ability to capture complete webpages with automatic scrolling.

PicPick is a lightweight yet full featured image editor and capturer, perfect for simple daily image editing tasks.

Download PicPick 1.7.2 in Softonic

Ever fancy making your own film but don't have the patience to learn the major editing packages such as Adobe Premiere and Final Cut?

Then Auto Movie Creator converts you into Steven Spielberg but without the hours spent learning how to cut and splice and render videos that most video editing packages require. In fact, the program does much of the work for you via the editing wizard which is effectively your Assistant Director. It takes you logically and slowly through every step holding your hand as you go from capturing video to outputting it in a format that's suitable for your needs. One of the most time-consuming parts of editing is going through the footage to see which parts you need to take out. Auto Movie Creator even does this for you simply by selecting "Detect Scenes" and the program automatically scans your footage for the best quality shots. It also allows you to add professional style effects such as dissolves and fades simply by dragging and dropping them into the timeline. You can also add photos and other images into your video to give them a more personal touch.

Auto Movie Creator feels more like a photo editing package than a video editor but this is the key behind it's appeal - it requires absolutely no prior editing knowledge and is simple enough for even the most amateur of video makers.

Download Auto Movie Creator 3.13 in Softonic

In these days where most things have been commercialised to the hilt, it’s always refreshing to come across a free piece of software that performs as well as its pricey rivals. Irfanview has long been a shining example of such a program, and I’ve been using the app for some time for perusing and managing my ever-growing photo collection.

Amazingly, since Bosnian developer Irfan Skiljan released the image viewer back in 1996, he’s generously kept it free of charge in spite of its massive popularity. Perhaps even more incredibly, the app still stands at just over 1Mb, bucking the trend of programs that swell immensely as the feature updates go by. In fact, it’s Irfanview’s slimline qualities that are its greatest asset, helping to make it the fastest image viewer in the West. Images load almost instantaneously when you click on them and you get rapid-fire results when cycling through a directory of photos using the Back and Forward buttons. It’s only when you’re flicking through vast amounts of images using the thumbnail viewer that things get a bit slow, which could easily be remedied do with an improved caching function.

Another of Irfanview’s crowd-pleasing talents is its ability to handle an enormous range of different file formats, including g, somewhat rarely, icon (.ico) files. Unlike many of its rival tools, Irfanview doesn’t try to impose itself as the default viewer for all image types, giving you the option to specify the formats you wish to associate with it for yourself.

The program’s functionality can be expanded by installing plug-ins that allow Irfanview to open other file types, such as movies and audio – again a unique feature among photo viewers. You also get a smattering of basic editing features such as crop, rotate, flip and resize, along with some bread-and-butter effects like blur and sharpen, plus a smart crop function.

Upon first try, many users might be put off by the somewhat basic interface and the fact that it loads new images externally, rather than within the GUI itself. Nevertheless this is a small sacrifice to pay for a program that proves to be probably the quickest way to view images on your PC.

Download IrfanView 4.20 in Softonic

Despite the popularity of online photo sharing services like Flickr, there are still people who prefer to handle their photos and create albums with desktop software tools.

A good example of these tools is KoffeePhoto, with which you can easily manage your photos and share them online with family and friends. After creating a user account for free, you'll be given access to a private profile page with unlimited album hosting and photo sharing capabilities. I'm somewhat reluctant to believe the "unlimited" bit, but I was unable to find any small print about limitations.

KoffeePhoto lets you create albums with personal comments for each photo. You can then choose to share them online or not; if you do, the program sends a customized e-mail message to selected addresses with a link to the online album.

The program also includes a basic image editor that enables you to improve some elements in pictures (light, color, perspective) as well as add basic filters (namely sepia and black and white). Albums though can't be customized.

With KoffePhoto you'll be able to organize and share photos online very easily, and also use it as a backup tool for your pictures.

Download KoffeePhoto 2.5.118 in Softonic

With an ever growing collection of digital photos, many of us are in constant search of an appropriate tool to manage them all.

Photo Manager 2008 Professional can be the answer to this search. This full featured application works as a photo manager, viewer and editor, plus including some extra tools to make the most of your photo collection: HTML album maker, tag editor and more.

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 in a gorgeous full-screen slideshow, apply a series of basic edition effects, create an HTML photo album to share your pictures online, see and edit EXIF data (which includes camera model, exposure, date and time, etc) for 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 Professional falls a bit 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 often find in other photo editors.

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

Download Photo Manager 2008 Professional 1.0 Release 2 in Softonic

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

Due to lossy nature of the JPEG format each editing and subsequent recompression of JPEG images in generic image editors such as Photoshop results in progressive degradation of image quality.

Fortunately, in many cases there is a way to avoid the unnecessary recompression. If all you need is to quickly process a bunch of JPEG photos from the latest vacation - rotate, crop, remove red eye effect, imprint date or comment - you don't have to compromize the quality. Better JPEG is a batch JPEG editor capable of doing all this editing losslessly.

Main features:

• Lossless transformations - rotation, flip
• Lossless crop (free, fixed aspect, fixed size, predefined and user-defined aspects and sizes), composition guidelines (diagonals, golden mean, rule of thirds)
• Highly customizable lossless date/EXIF info/text insertion (position, font, size, color, background, language, format, etc.)
• Advanced lossless red eye removal (anti-aliasing, adjustable size, sensitivity, darkening)
• Copy/paste to external editor and back for local retouching without full recompression
• Batch image processing
• Multi-level undo/redo
• Metadata preservation
• Compression optimization

Download BetterJPEG 2.0.0.2 in Softonic

I'm only an amateur photographer who takes photos in JPG format with a simple compact camera, but I know professional photographers sometimes prefer to work with the RAW format, which allows further processing.

Being a more professional-oriented format, RAW images require special software applications like Capture One Pro. This complete photo viewer and editor lets you manage your RAW images with ease. It features an interface divided into three different sections (system directory tree, folder contents preview and image preview) and also includes a complete analysis of each selected photo.

With Capture One Pro you'll be able to tweak exposure, white balance, focus and other values in your RAW images and then save them in other formats (the program also works as a RAW converter). Each time you apply a change to the image you'll be able to preview the result in real time.

Capture One Pro is by no means a standard photo editor for standard users. It's a special software tool that's been specifically designed for advanced photographers, which means you may find it a bit difficult to use. Also, bear in mind that Capture One Pro is not compatible with all RAW formats, so you better check if your camera is supported before using the program.

With Camera One Pro you can view, tweak, edit and convert your RAW files in a professional working environment.

Download Capture One Pro 3.7.8 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

If you can't wait to show off the photos of your latest holidays in the Caribbean, or you'd like to make a special presentation with your family video collection, you need an application like Photos & Videos on TV.

This tool enables you to create a fully customizable slideshow containing photos and videos, plus a customizable music soundtrack and a selection of filters, special effects and transition effects that can add the final touch to your composition. The whole process is really easy to complete, even for people that have never used a similar tool.

The program's interface is divided into several areas: one displays the folder structure on your system so that you can select the content you want to include in the slideshow; another one displays the video or picture selected at that very moment; and finally the timeline is where you can drag and drop everything you want to add to the slideshow.

Photos & Videos on TV includes a ton of special effects, filters and transition effects to spice up your presentation. Once finished, you can export the slideshow to high quality video or record it directly to DVD. The only drawback is that the file weighs more than 500 MB, meaning it takes a while to download and run, and it's quite heavy on system resources.

With Photos & Videos on TV you can create high quality personalized slideshows with your photos and videos, including also special filters and transition effects. The only drawback is that you'll need a powerful machine to do so.

Download Photos & Videos on TV Deluxe 5.3 in Softonic

Most graphical editors are either for photos or video but FreeVimager allows you to do both, albeit to a limited extent.

It's particularly useful for anyone who normally uses their camera for both photos and videos (which most of us do). First of all, it's extremely lightweight for both an image and video editor weighing in at just over 10MB. The program allows you to view & edit graphics file in jpeg, bmp, gif, tiff (multi-page), png and pcx format which is a decent amount and sufficient for most home users. It's also remarkably flexible supporting every version of Windows from 95 onwards. One aspect which is particularly useful is that of multi-monitor support which basically means that you can work on multiple projects at once - for example one photos project and one video project. It's also suitable for those in the know or who need technical data when it comes to photos because it maintains EXIF data when resaving and editing photos so you can see at a glance the aperture, exposure and file size instantly. You can process an unlimited number of images at once as the program also comes equipped with a very basic slideshow creator. You can also preview print jobs, create collages and it optimises images for sending by e-mail (by basically reducing their size without losing the quality).

For anyone that uses their camera for both photos and videos regularly, then FreeVimager will give you enough power to do both at once without complicating life.

Download FreeVimager 1.7.0 in Softonic