Best Freeware Digital Photo Organizer software for Windows
Digital photo management software is designed for people who want to organize and share personal and family photos, but they don’t want to spend a lot of time editing them. Addition to that helping you browse and sort through your image collection, they also allow you to catalog your media with keywords, descriptions and categories. These tools usually do not offer pixel-level editing capabilities such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Graphics suite, instead they provide easy, one-click corrections plus printing and photo sharing features. Here are the best free digital photo organizer software at your fingertips.
FastStone Image Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG).
Picasa from Google
Picasa is a flashy and functional digital photo organizer and editor which has improved considerably since its first release. Picasa is excellent for beginners and casual digital shooters who want to find all their pictures, sort them into albums, do quick edits, and share with friends and family. I especially like the Picasa Web Albums integration which gives you 1024 MB of free space to post your photos online. Best of all, Picasa is free!
Windows Live Photo Gallery
Windows Live Photo Gallery helps you import your photos and videos from digital cameras, camcorders, CDs, DVDs, and Windows Live Spaces. You can browse the pictures on your computer by folder or by date, and you can add keyword tags, ratings and captions for even more organization. Clicking the “Fix” button gives you easy-to-use tools for adjusting exposure, color, detail (sharpness), and for cropping and removing red eye. All edits are saved automatically, but can be reverted at a later time. There is also an automatic panorama stitching tool.
XnView
With XnView you can quickly and easily view, process, organize and convert image files. XnView is able to read more than 500 different formats and then convert them to other formats such as GIF, BMP, JPG, PNG, multi page TIFF. XnView can also display video formats, many digital camera formats and more exotic formats such as Amiga IFF and Calamus.
The Image viewer (Browser) is similar to Windows Explorer. You simply navigate the directory structure as desired and any image files found in a directory are displayed in miniature (Thumbnails). This lets you keep an overview of the images available at the same time as letting you quickly view and select specific images.
XnView also offers more advanced features, such as Web page creation, contact prints, multiple conversion (format and transformation), slide shows, screen capturing, and Twain support for scanners and digital cameras. The integrated file operations, such as copying, moving, and creating directories and files, make XnView the universal tool for graphics.
NOTE: Freeware for private non-commercial, educational use and non-profit organization. It’s designed for more advanced users.
Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition
Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition software makes it easy to find, fix, and share digital photos. It also organizes digital photos quickly.
Instantly fix photo flaws with just a click or two. Share your memories in a slide show with captions or e-mail individual photos to family and friends. Need to make adjustments? You can edit one now.
JetPhoto Studio
A full-featured digital photo organizer and Web publisher. JetPhoto Studio will enable user to organize photos by notes, keywords, time and location. The specified date or time the user took the photos will be highlighted in calendar (Month View or Week View).
Using the calendar, you can log your travel by taking photos or use digital camera to compose your multimedia diary. As another innovative feature, JetPhoto also integrates GPS technology to locate and link photos on geographical map.
JetPhoto Studio provides some utilities to resize pictures and stamp watermarks in batches, generate Flash movie with photo slideshow and crop pictures for your cell phone or PDA screens.
Once the photo album is prepared on a user’s personal Macintosh, only one click is needed to synchronize local album with online web photo album based on JetPhoto Server.
All uploaded pictures will be resized and stamped with watermark automatically while web publishing. JetPhoto Server enables users to quickly build and customize a searchable, full-featured photo web site.
It’s a freeware and you can download this useful application.
PicaJet Free Edition
PicaJet is a simple, yet magnificently equipped and powerful digital photo album exposing a rich set of features and plenty of those “small touches” that provide a really big impact!
There has long been a real need for a photo album application that would be as simple and intuitive as the real-world variety. Observing this, we got right to work on a solution. The result?
PicaJet, a Digital Photo Album application that’s as straightforward and simple to use as the one on your bookshelf, but outfitted with all the features you’d expect from digital technology!
PicaJet is a software that enhances, prints, finds and share your digital photos.
PicaJet enables you to import your photos quickly and easily from your digital camera, scanner or image files, and then manage, view, enhance, print and share a lifetime of precious memories.
So here they are, I’ve personally used all of them but FastStone, Picasa and XnView stands out in the crowd. Where Picasa is well known for simplicity and XnView is well known as a Swiss army knife of image operations. JetPhoto Studio is also a very promising application to look into. Those who are using Vista most probably already seen Windows Live Photo Gallery on their system.
So what are you using? Do you know of another cool digital photo organizer application that should be listed here. You can find me on twitter @ruhanirabin if you want to let me know about your opinion. Don’t forget to share your comments. Alternatively you can simply stay updated via my RSS Feed too.
Some of the link on this post may have affiliate links attached. Read the FTC Disclaimer.