Zoner Photo Studio Free, on the other hand, is an image organizer that not only helps you organize your images but also has basic editing and sharing features.
To top it off, IrfanView is true freeware (free for all use, home and business) plus has a portable version you can download (although the portable version isn’t native, it is through PortableApps). IrfanView doesn’t have a very fancy interface but the interface is decluttered which makes the program not only dead-simple to use but also makes it light on resources (relatively speaking)… all while maintaining an insane amount of features ranging from support for dozens of image, audio, and video formats (including animated GIFs and Photoshop PSDs), basic image editing, image conversion capabilities with batch processing, unicode support, and much more. Out of these three, in my opinion the clear winner for image viewer is IrfanView while the winner for image organizer is Zoner Photo Studio FREE. My top three picks out of the above-mentioned twelve are IrfanView, Zoner Photo Studio FREE, and FastStone Image Viewer simply because all three are feature-filled and easy-to-use at the same time. So I’m depending on all you dotTechies to chime in the comments below to provide better feedback than myself.
Zoner Photo Studio FREE (Organizer + Viewer)įastStone Image Viewer (Organizer + Viewer)īefore I dish out my advice, let me confess that image viewers/organizers are not what I would consider an area of expertise for myself. 12 FREE IMAGE VIEWERS OR ORGANIZERS Picasa (Organizer + Viewer) This article lists 12 free image viewers or image organizers for you to pick from.
To solve the woes of Windows Photo Viewer, there are many third-party image viewers or organizers out there that you can download. However, that built-in image viewer has many limitations such as the inability to view animated GIFs, inability to crop images, inability to easily share images aside from via email, inability to convert images, etc. In fact one problem I had was that I downloaded a load of image files that were already tagged and the tags were automatically imported.Windows comes with built-in capability to view images. Tags and such are applied in well-known meta-data regions that can be ported to other applications. That's about all I use, there's lots more in there including things like date sorting (which ignores the folder structure and lets you view virtual folders by date) and colour searching. + Uploading images to Facebook (and in the past to other places like Flickr and a private Gallery2 site) and keeping track of which images were uploaded (by using tags). + What else, oh, when it's somewhere new I usually add some geo coordinates so that if in the future if we want to remember where we were, or my kids want to find the place we visited, or somesuch then they can
+ Search by keywords, or by drawing a rudimentary image and doing image matching. + It also has face recognition and tagging, so I can access a folder of images and choose nice pictures based on who is in them, or if I want a picture with a certain group of people in then I can find them all.
+ It has a print manager to help arrange images on sheets of photo paper, add titles and such. + It has an editor that's good for colour correction cropping and similar functions (I use GIMP for more complex changes). + It manages meta-data and tags (yes my own taxonomy) that I apply to allow me to easily find images and to give space to write some text. I guess what I'm really asking is: What sorts of things do you do with your photos that makes a photo organizer an indispensable tool? How do you use the organizer to make your work easier? No thanks I don't load images into an editor unless I plan on actually editing them. Now you're no longer a photo organizer, but an image editor with an index. "Well, you can also edit your photos as you review them in the organizer." Uh, no.
But given how incredibly rarely I do that, I could accomplish the same thing by launching Geeqie on a directory full of softlinks. "Well, you can create custom slideshows by selecting photos by category or individually." Uh, all right, vaguely useful. "Well, you can organize them by category." Okay, how is the initial categorization done? Or do I have to invent (and remember) my own taxonomy of tags, and apply them to each photo in turn? Assuming I go to that trouble, is this metadata portable in the event I decide to change to another organizer? Great now I have double the number of image files to manage (original plus thumbnails). Every so often, I let one of these "photo organizers" loose on the lot, and the only evident result is a gallery of thumbnails. Except for the ones from a very old phone, they all still have their original filenames and datestamps. I have a pile of a few thousand (gack!) photos sitting in well-known directories. "For organizing your photos, you dullard."