Three years ago, my desktop packed it in and I did not have anything backed up to an external hard drive. A month, or so, ago, my laptop packed it in, just a few days after my external hard drive did the same thing. I lost some data, to say the least, but also lost software that I had been using for years. That said...

I need to find a good picture editing software and, of course, I would like to get what I need for free, or even a donation to the rewarding site. Can anyone help me find some decent picture editing software? Something that you use yourself and allows decent pictures, for use on the web.

Thanks and looking forward to sharing again.

Irfanview

Nothing fancy, no ads, not online, resident on your computer. Not bloatware with a bunch of stuff you don't want to do.

IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide

Hi, Randy -

I use Photo Filtre v.7. It works well enough. Homepage link is here. The v.7 is freeware but v.X has a fee.

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.

Gimp is pretty much as powerful (and complex) as Photosh*p, open source.

https://www.gimp.org/

When I used Microsoft Windows, I liked Irfanview a lot. I'm a graphical idiot, so I can only do basic things, and Irfanview made it easy for me. The price is right, too.

I've had other people tell me Gimp is very good, but I have no background with photoshop and such, and found it unintuitive enough that I immediately gave up.

I had the same experience with Gimp.

There's definitely a learning curve.

I use this online editor:

https://pixlr.com/express/

Nothing fancy. Perfect for a Luddite like myself.

I do most of my photo editing on the Flickr web site. It's capabilities are fairly limited, but it does things like cropping, orientation adjustment (beyond just simple rotate) and basic color correction. They used to limit the number of photos you could store on the site, but if there is still a limit it's pretty high and I haven't hit it in a while. The other benefit, of course, is that you don't lose your pictures when your local computer dies.

I no expert, but I can use Gimp in basic ways. It is definitely worth a try.

Randy you didn't mention your OS? This Windows suggestion from gugie looks like it covers all the bases. 64 bit and good up to Windows 10 so it has a shelf life. If you want more than that, and you're NOT a luddite, buy an older Adobe Creative Suite license from someone. Even a 10 year old version of photoshop will do most anything you need for the web.

Back up your data! (I still prefer a desktop, laptops are fragile. Use phones/tablets for mobility)