While it's no longer supported by Google, Picasa was the best freebie I ever found for photo organizing and basic editing. Unfortunately it's no longer even available for download.

Too bad. Google had an opportunity to make Picasa a viable alternative to Adobe Lightroom (which is my main photo editor). All Picasa really needed was better raw tools for white balance, noise reduction and sharpening. Google had bought out Nik's excellent editing suite, which could have been incorporated into Picasa. Instead, Google killed both Picasa and Nik.

That's one of many examples of why I'll never depend on Google for any photo or document tools. They have a terrible track record for unexpectedly yanking support for popular web tools. Google can't seem to figure out how to monetize anything except our personal data.

Irfanview is a pretty good freebie. I've used it for years for some quickie chores, such as copy/pasting an image for cropping and basic fixes before saving. No need to import or keep the original. However the editing tools are very limited and primitive by most standards -- brightness, contrast, gamma, color correction are all very crude. Unfortunately Irfanview has never fully integrated the Thumbnails viewer, so it remains a two-step process. (That was the beauty of Picasa -- the viewer/browser was fully integrated into the editing tools.) On the plus side it's very low resource and will run on pretty much any machine.

FastStone was pretty good too. I used it for awhile years ago. Better editing tools than Irfanview, better integration of a file browser.