Phuoc's Free Software Bank

The GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is an open source graphics editing program. It's very similar to Adobe's PhotoShop and is extremely powerful. For most users, the GIMP can take care of any editing needs they may have. There are plenty of controls such as curves and levels, filters, layers, etc. Filters and plugins are also available for it that will extend its capabilities. The user interface will take a little getting used to if you're coming from PhotoShop or other Windows program, but once you get over the initial learning curve, it can't be beat!

PortableApps.com has packaged the GIMP into a portable app so you can run everything from one folder. A portable app runs everything from 1 folder, making it easy to take with you on a USB drive or to test drive a new piece of software. Uninstalling is just a matter of deleting the entire application folder, leaving nothing behind.

Now developed by Google, Picasa is a very well written application and carries many of the usability features Google apps are known for. Picasa is primarily a catalog/library management program for your images. It's not really a thumbnails viewer per se. For an excellent thumbnails viewer, see FastStone Image Viewer below. Picasa allows you to organize your images into libraries and can maintain a list of watched folders. This way even if your images are in different places, they'll all be in one logical place in the library. Picasa also allows you to do simple editing like red eye, brightness, etc. as well as share images with friends.

FastStone Image Viewer is a thumbnail, file tree type image viewer program. It doesn't catalog your images or maintain watched folders or any of that; it just view your images in the file tree structure. But damn if it doesn't do that well. In fact, FastStone Image Viewer is the best of its type I've ever seen, paid or free. It's fast, supports a ton of file formats including RAW files from many digital camera manufacturers and has some basic, but useful editing capabilities. There are things like resize, convert to another format, and rotate. Perhaps one of the best features is batch rename of files based on rules you set up. Download, unzip and use. If you don't like it, delete the folder and it's gone. *** I can't stress how highly I recommend this program. I use it everyday!

This is another excellent app that I use almost everyday. FastStone Capture is a screen capture program with so many useful features that I don't even know where to begin. You can do full screen capture, capture an active window/dialog box or object, mark of an area on screen to capture or capture scrolling contents in a window, like Firefox for example and have it be in 1 image. After capturing, you have the ability to resize, crop the image even more if necessary, and then save and a variety of standard file formats. There's also a screen magnifier that's useful in apps like Excel where numbers can get really small. It runs as a portable app, so it leaves nothing on your system if you choose to remove it. But why would you?

Paint.Net is a graphics editing program written for Windows using the .NET framework. It's a small app, but powerful, supporting layers, multiple file formats, adjustments, and effects. All of the standard editing features are also there like rotate images, red eye, etc. Not nearly as feature rich as the GIMP, Paint.Net will serve most people's editing needs. The user interface is slicker then the GIMP's, but due to some visual enhancements chosen by the developers, it may run slower on older systems. You shouldn't have a problem though if you computer is relatively new.