It's really unbelievable to find free software applications as amazing as Photoscape. But as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Here you have a really excellent photo editing tool that includes just about everything you need to view, optimize, edit, print and have fun with your photos, all for free.

Photoscape strikes us from the very beginning with an uncommon interface design from which you can choose what you want to do: view pictures, optimize those that didn't come out so well, print several photos on a single page collage-style or perhaps add any of the dozens of filters and special effects included in the program. Other extra tools featured in Photoscape are a file renamer, a color picker, a screen capture tool and even a RAW converter.

We really have nothing negative to say about Photoscape. Just download it, test it, love it and keep it forever. It's free!

Download Photoscape 3.2 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 3.50.54 in Softonic

Hardcopy is a professional and easy-to-use application that allows you to capture screenshots under Windows. You can capture rectangular parts of the screen as well as complete windows. Captured images can be cut easily and colour shade can be modified. Pictures can be saved, copied in Clipboard, edited with any imaging program or printed.

Download HardCopy 17.0.08 in Softonic

Poster Forge is a fun tool that enables you to create posters with your own digital pictures in a very easy way. Unlike other similar tools, which only create larger versions of the image for you to print out, Poster Forge adds some cool effects that can turn any picture into a motivational poster, movie poster or a Far West "Wanted" style poster.

The program's interface is divided into three tabs (one for each kind of poster) and includes all the tools you need to customize them. Simply add a picture, type in any text you want, tweak a few settings and you're pretty much done. Unfortunately, there were things I couldn't customize, such as font size. Also, even though there's a tool to move the picture around and make it fit better, it's very limited and sometimes the picture needs to be cropped with a third-party app.

Once finished, the poster can be saved as an image file or conveniently printed as a poster with the built-in printing tool, which enables you to optimize poster printing and make them easier to assemble.

Turn your photos into original posters very easily and in just a few minutes.

Download Poster Forge 1.01.11 in Softonic

CyberLink is a comprehensive program designed to let you manage, edit, optimize and share your photos and videos.

CyberLink MediaShow allows you to arrange your photo collection in any way you like, supporting the dragging and dropping of images. You can organize and enhance your videos or photos easily or you can even create a personalized screensaver for your computer by dragging pictures onto the screensaver icon.

CyberLink MediaShow features what the designers call a "Liquid Interface" which allows you to browse pictures and videos in a unique way. The entire interface is in 3D which obviously puts a lot of pressure on your RAM but it really makes images jump out at you in much the same way as browsing pictures on Picasa. CyberLink MediaShow immediately detects external devices as soon as they are connected and imports the images into its library for instant use.

CyberLink MediaShow has everything to make your photo slideshows into something special but it does require a lot of RAM and processing power.

Download CyberLink MediaShow 4.0.1805.7150 in Softonic

ImagePut is all about sharing images and organizing them into beautiful albums in an easy-to-use and attractive interface.

However, it can also be used to share cool things you see on the Internet with others. So for example, if you see a great picture on a website, you can drop it into the interface and instantly share it with your friends. ImagePut allows you to upload a collection of internet images in as well as create image based presentations.

ImagePut works with most major image formats and allows you to upload images to Flickr, Inspiration, Glowfoto, TinyPic and PicOodle! You can upload files separately or in batches and it even includes a very basic but functional editor to add elements to a photograph or eliminate red-eye.

ImagePut doesn't really offer anything out of the ordinary for a piece of image presentation software but it does at least cater for all image needs whether it's presentations or just sharing.

Download ImagePut 1.2 in Softonic

For a while now, computer users have been waking up to the real threats that exist while browsing the web. Every day, more turn their back on the established vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer and opt for the hottest open source project on the net, Mozilla’s Firefox. But there are plenty of alternatives that offer great features, and one of those is Avant Browser.

Based on Internet Explorer, Avant will import all your favorites automatically and also keep your settings intact. As such it makes a good alternative to the popular Firefox browser, which shuns all things IE, and may seem slightly too foreign from the conventions that many users have built up while using Microsoft’s browser. Although Avant Browser is based on the Internet Explorer engine, it doesn’t fall victim to the same security vulnerabilities (although no-one is claiming that it’s invulnerable), and while it’s at it, adds some great tools designed to enhance your browsing experience.

The Flash blocker is an effective way to keep memory usage of the browser to a minimum or to simply cut out those over-elaborate ads that invade and take over many web sites. To appeal to a wider audience, there are quick links that let you quickly translate pages to a wide selection of languages, or you can customize the look of the browser using the many skins that are included by default. Of course, no modern browser could claim to be complete without tabbed browsing and Avant really delivers the goods with a system that allows you to even reload tabs after you’ve closed them.

In fact, this browser has some of the best extras that we’ve seen to date, in particular the system whereby tabs can be resized like normal program windows letting you display multiple site windows side-by-side, within one browser window. There‘s also a useful toolbar item that displays tags describing the page that you’re on. Click on a tag and you open a list of site that result from a search using that tag or keyword; brilliant! And the piece de résistance is an automatic session saver that lets you open up all the sites you were browsing when you last closed the program.

Avant Browser is relatively unknown as a mainstream browser and as such is not restricted from experimenting and taking the best ideas from the big hitters, as well as adding its own nuggets to the mix. What you get is a very impressive selection of tools in a browser that will even run your Microsoft update without objections. Definitely worth consideration if you are thinking of changing browser.

Download Avant Browser 11.7.15 in Softonic

Easy GIF Animator is powerful yet very easy to use software for creating and editing animated GIF images. With this animated GIF editor you can easily create animated pictures, banners and buttons in no time.

You can use special features to add stunning visual effects and prepare your animation for publishing on your web page. Easy GIF Animator supports all types of GIF animation and provides high compression and great quality for your animated GIF images. To top it all off, Easy GIF Animator is the best priced animated GIF editor on the market today.

Download Easy GIF Animator 4.8 in Softonic

ID-sized photos tend to be something that you never have enough of and, given that it can be a pain to go to the closest mall and get some new ones taken, you could just take a recent photo and make multiple copies of it from the comfort of your PC. IDPhotoStudio is a program that will create and print passport sized photos for you in a snap.

Featuring only the bare necessities, IDPhotoStudio, will handle the job in seconds, allowing you to drag and drop your picture onto the interface. You can then select between three ID Photo sizes: US, Canada or France. Because you often need a certain number of photos printed out, IDPhotoStudio has a little drag meter to let you select how many photos you’ll need, from 1 to 15. Click on the print button to get the paper copies of your photo.

IDPhotoStudio is an original idea, and it’s good to see someone come up with a program to quickly print out ID photos. However, the application left us disappointed for a number of reasons. First of all, it doesn’t respect the aspect ratio of photos, so if you drag a large image there’s a risk it’ll appear distorted. Also, when it comes to editing functions, IDPhotoStudio only includes the option to apply sepia or monochrome color filters. We would have preferred if it included tools like a red-eye remover, cropping or contrasting, which are much more useful for improving the quality of pictures. The program doesn't even include an undo feature, meaning that if you accidentally set your image to greyscale when you'd prefer it in color, you'll need to start over.

If you have a good mug shot of yourself and want to quickly print out a set of passport sized photos, IDPhotoStudio will probably suit you. However, the lack of advanced editing features means you’ll never really be guaranteed with a high quality image of yourself. In all, if you want to be on the safe side, use a proper photo editing application like Photoshop or Photofiltre to edit and print good ID sized photos.

Download IDPhotoStudio 2.5.0.17 in Softonic

Shareaza started out life as the legendary Gnutella network but today is one of the most realistic competitors to eMule.

Shareaza is a completely free peer to peer (P2P) file sharing system. The program features Multi-Network Support which basically means it can connect up to 4 separate Peer-to-Peer networks at the same time meaning more hits and faster downloads.

You can download and upload from the EDonkey2000, Gnutella, BitTorrent and Gnutella2 (G2) networks. The latest release features something called "Collections" too. Collections basically group previews of album covers, descriptions, and song lists all in one complete package. It's designed to help you discover similar music to that you already like although in reality, it's not that useful. The interface is very simple to use - very much like eMule. All the search results are displayed clearly including file type, size and estimated download time. You can also choose to filter searches by file type such as picture, video or software.

Shareaza is one of the best P2P networks out there although it still pales in comparison to eMule in terms of results and download speeds.

Download Shareaza 2.4.0 in Softonic

Wallpaper Master offers a number of options to renew your desktop background image. Create categories to organize your wallpapers and order your different images in a list on the interface. Individual Overrides, like style, alignment or border can be modified directly from the program window. Images can also be set up on multiple monitors in one click.

Despite a good deal of options, we were slightly disappointed with Wallpaper Master. There's no drag and drop, which means you have to browse and select all the pictures you want to use as wallpapers. The effects you can add to them, mirror, black and white and mosaic, are fairly limited and do not add much to your images.

Once you chosen the image you'll use as wallpapers and set up the rotation you can let Wallpaper Master take care of the rest. The program could be a bit more intuitive and offer more effects, but on the whole is a good piece of software to manage your wallpapers.

Download Wallpaper Master Pro 2.16 in Softonic

When it comes to photo editing, the undisputed king is Photoshop. But if you're looking for a cheaper alternative that can give you the same – or at least similar – functionality then Active Pixels is an excellent choice.

This photo editor resembles Photoshop in many aspects, from the way menus and windows are laid out on its interface to the keyboard shortcuts used for many actions. It also includes similar tools, like the magic wand, the gradient, the polygonal lasso and others. What's more, it supports working with layers. Active Pixels also includes some extra embedded apps, such as a red-eye fixer, a picture browser and a screen capture tool - although it only grabs full-screen images.

That said, bear in mind that this free photo editor is not as powerful as Adobe's big shot. Despite the large number of filters and effects included, some of them lack proper configuration settings. I specially disliked the way sliders are designed: they're very uncomfortable to use.

In any case, Active Pixels is an excellent photo editor that can be very useful for those cases in which you don't have Photoshop at hand or you just prefer to use a lighter app to perform the same tasks.

A great photo editor with which you can edit and optimize images, all for free.

Download Active Pixels 3.05 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 2.0.1.11b in Softonic

Thumbnail Generator is an application that allows you to create thumbnails of folders of images, thus saving you time and work. The program boasts a simple appearance and it's very easy to use.

Just take your favorite pictures and create thumbnails to use in web albums, on online forums or as avatars for your IM app.

Take a look at what Thumbnail Generator has to offer:

• Fixed thumbnail size irrespective of original image size
• Create thumbnails for a whole folder in one operation
• Add watermarks to thumbnails

Download Thumbnail Generator 1.2.0 in Softonic

Like many other things in Windows, Vista failed to address some pretty basic issues that still persist.

One of those is the simple act of file renaming which you still can't do in bulk. However, with this program, you can easily solve that problem plus many other file renaming issues. With this tool you can organize your music, picture, video, or any other types of files with much greater speed and flexibility than ordinarily in Windows. PFrank comes equipped wit a very useful preview button which allows you to preview changes before you make them. You can select several files at once - in fact as many as you want - and rename them all at the same time. The author claims that there is virtually no renaming function that can't be carried out by this program but if there is something you can't do, you can probably find out how to do it on the developer forums.

A useful little utility that's flexible and should come as standard with Windows Vista.

Download PFrank (Vista) 2.24 in Softonic

PFrank is simple but convenient way to change and alter multiple files in one go without having to go through them one by one.

The developer claims to have been motivated by the lack of a decent renaming program as most have to be run with multiple passes using different sets of renaming sequences until finally getting the required names. PFrank allows you to rename everything you want to in one go using a Windows Explorer style interface. However, it does have a lot of options for deciding how and what type of files you want to rename which can be a bit tricky. For this reason, the developer has started a forum which deals with most of the main problems. Particularly with the new features that have been added, you may experience problems. These include the new plugin for insertion of meta data from raw image files (e.g. cr2, nef, sr2) and a much improved undo facility, new filters, new positioning controls and the ability for users to plug in their own renaming commands. There's also a recently added custom list manager for managing any number of custom lists for repeat file changing.

For those that do a lot of file changing and renaming, PFrank is an excellent mass file name changer that will ensure you save time.

Download PFrank 2.24 in Softonic

When it comes to managing and organizing the files on your computer, most of us are perfectly content to use the Windows Explorer. In fact, many people don’t even realise there are alternatives to the built-in file manager, which is starting to get a little long in the tooth now (unless you’ve got Vista, which adds some interesting new tools). Once you’ve tried a different file manager, however, it’s often difficult to go back, especially if that file manager is Directory Opus.

From the outset it’s clear to see that Opus is like Windows Explorer on steroids. The default directory layout is very similar to Explorer but with one key difference – it shows two folders in separate tree-view panes (although you can switch to the more conventional single-folder Flat View). This makes moving files around much easier because you can instantly drag and drop files into other folders without having to open and close new windows.

However, the main difference you’ll notice between Directory Opus and its Windows rival lies at the top of the screen, within the programs toolbar and menu options. Upon closer inspection you start to realise this is much more than just a utility for organizing your files into folders.

When you first install the application it seems to want to take over your whole system, bombarding you with requests to make it your default image viewer, FTP client and the like. We were first dubious about surrendering all these tasks to one application, but after using Opus for a while we went back and checked all of these default radio buttons. It has enough might to handle a huge range of common tasks including viewing pictures, converting files, playing audio, opening Zip files, batch renaming and searching. All of these tools run quickly and can be accessed from one interface without a great deal of fuss. Another boon is the fact that Opus is infinitely customisable, giving you complete control over the layout and structure of your file manager and its supplementary tools.

In terms of sheer power, this is a real brute of a program and makes Explorer look positively weedy. The sheer scale of options and advanced settings means that Directory Opus can be a little overwhelming at first, but once you’ve learned how to tame the beast by customizing the program to your needs, you’ll be astonished at how much it offers. Since discovering the app, we haven't gone back to Explorer and have subsequently ditched many of the apps we used to use on a regular basis such as WinZip and SmartFTP.

Download Directory Opus 9.1.1.3 in Softonic

Anyone who works with images on a regular basis will be familiar with the default image viewer of Windows, and also with its very limited scope for doing anything meaningful. There is a healthy selection of alternatives but FastStone Image Viewer has come to our attention as one that deserves to be singled out not only because it is free but also because it brings to the table a strong combination of speed, usability and versatility.

While the viewing functionality is a no-brainer, FastStone comes with a range of methods with which to browse pics. First off, there is the standard file browser that displays thumbnails of your images with a preview window for the file that is currently selected. There is also an option to check out individual pictures at their original size in the “Windowed View”, which is along the same lines as the default image viewer in Windows. Finally you can see images in full-screen, switching between files using the keyboard, the middle mouse button or the slide-in toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

However, FastStone Image Viewer goes beyond simply displaying images. You can perform some quick edits to really bring out the best in your pics such as adding a stylish frame mark that acts as a mask to reduce the sharp edges or if you happen to be working with 3D there is also a very effective bump map option that will serve you well for texturing. There are of course the standard tools of brightness/darkness adjustment, sharpness/blur, grayscale, red-eye removal and more. For results better than those you get with FastStone, you would need to use a professional package like Photoshop.

Further great features come in the form of batch rename and batch convert options. These could prove invaluable to many web developers looking for a quick way to prepare their PSD files for the web. With the inclusion of these batch functions, it would have been good to push the boat out even further and have an option to apply batch effects, for example to brighten up a group of photos that were taken in a dark space but alas, it’s not there!

Looking for faults with FastStone Image Viewer is like looking for the corner of a circle although if you insist on nitpicking, you can say that in the thumbnail browser view dragging and dropping should be possible for moving files. However when you realize that it is possible to drag and drop with the left nav bar that argument looses its legs. As I mentioned, there is healthy competition in the image viewer arena, but thanks to the innovative features of FastStone Image Viewer the bar has been raised to new heights.

Download FastStone Image Viewer 3.6 in Softonic

FastStone Photo Resizer is designed to make resizing of large numbers of photos on the move as easy as possible.

If you're a design professional or produce presentations on a regular basis, you'll find this program useful especially if you travel around a lot. You can perform several basic functions in addition to resizing such as rotating, cutting and pasting, colour alterations and of course adjust the brightness and contrast of your images. In addition, once resized, you can add text and watermarks to images although the text styles and formats are limited. Of course, this is nothing special for an image resizer but the big bonus is that it can be run directly from a USB stick in which case it doesn't need installing - perfect if you are in a hurry.

The interface is very easy to use and supports the dragging and dropping of images into the program which speeds up conversions of huge batches significantly compared to browsing to each file. It supports a decent amount of formats including the relatively rare JPEG2000 format which is unusual for any type of imaging utility. The batch renaming and resizing utility also saves you work and time (and the risk of duplicated images) by automatically renumbering adjusted images in sequential order.

This is an excellent portable image resizer and if you're looking for something in this area which is free, fast and simple, you need look no further.

Download FastStone Photo Resizer Portable 2.6 in Softonic

If you're worried about the safety of your documents you should start using some encryption method to protect them.

PixelCryptor is probably one of the best options for your first steps into encryption. It enables you to protect your private documents by combining them into a package that is then encrypted with any photo of your choice.

The pixel data contained in this photo is what the program uses to protect your documents, by creating almost endless, hacker-proof combinations. And whenever you want to decrypt your documents, simply open the package with your documents and select the picture you used to encrypt it.

PixelCryptor may not offer as many security options and encryption methods as other tools, but it's very easy to use and probably the best choice for encryption newbies. On the downside, anyone who you're sending encrypted data too will need to have it installed.

PixelCryptor is a fairly basic encryption tool, mainly addressed at novice users, which uses images to encrypt confidential data.

Download PixelCryptor 1.2 in Softonic