With the development of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets that have a camera, the amount of images an average person takes has increased considerably. With so many pictures comes a variety of problems that have to do with our photos – how to make my new awesome selfie a size that fits my Facebook timeline cover photo; how to remove a passer-by that doesn’t belong in a family picture; how to print a photo so that it can be inserted into a photo frame of the right size; how to create a collage out of the pictures from a vacation and so on. For this article we collected and reviewed 10 software with unique features and functionality for quality and diverse work with images.
1. Icecream Image Resizer: image resizer
For those who are struggling with fitting their image to the right size without lowering its quality or its distortion, this program will be a very helpful one. It resizes images in bulk, supports drag and drop mechanisms for comfortable processing of files, supports such popular image formats as JPG, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and others, and offers ready pre-sets and custom sizes of the images. You can choose to resize images based on width or on height, preserve original aspect ratios and apply vertical image recognition (width and height parameters for vertically oriented images are switched automatically). All these great features can be used through the user-friendly interface of the program that is also translated into multiple languages.
2. GIMP: image editor
GIMP is a legendary free analog of Photoshop – a great, powerful, free image editing software. You can not only use the most basic graphic tools like brushes, bucket fill, text, eraser, and airbrush, but also advanced ones like fuzzy select, foreground select, measure, clone, ink and other tools. Working with layers and filters and channels and paths is also perfectly supported. The interface is not exactly eye candy, but as for the rest, it is an advanced and free image editor with plenty of functions and great usability.
3. ArcSoft Print Creator: image printing
This is a very handy tool with a nice looking interface for printing images in an advanced way. When you proceed to program, you’ll see 12 various ways of printing out your photos; for example, quarter-fold greeting page, photo book, photo prints are helpful for printing images as is, album page, brochures & flyers, photo calendar, half-fold greeting and scrapbook are for adding graphic elements to your images before you print them out. Some templates are available for free, and others are accessible at a price, but even the free ones that are offered are enough for simple and effective image printing.
4. Picture Collage Maker: collage maker
This is a collage creator that offers several different ways of collage making. The “Create Blank Collage” button will offer you a choice of size, DPI and orientation of your future collage, and then in the selected area you are free to add your images, move and change their sizes, rotate them, add frames and clipart to them and much more. Basically, this menu button is for creating a collage from scratch while adding your own customization. “Template Collage Wizard” will fit your images into the chosen templates. “Create From Template” is not just for simple insertion of images to the standard templates, but for advanced customization of both templates and images. “Grid Collage Wizard” places all the added photos as a solid grid. The only inconvenience about this program is the fact that it has a 15 day trial period and it reminds you about it constantly.
5. XnConvert: image converter
This is a powerful image converter that supports over 80 image formats. It is no doubt an advanced program that allows you to apply actions to the proceeded pictures while converting. In addition to that, it is extremely helpful for batch conversion and it offers you customization of plenty of options and settings, but unfortunately it is not at all intuitive while using it. If it wasn’t for that, this is a great conversion utility that is available in multiple languages.
6. Funny Photo Maker: funny photo maker
If you want to joke around with some images and fit your face into the picture of animals, place photos on the cover of magazines or pretend they are on the wall of a famous gallery, Funny Photo Maker is the right program for you. After you upload a photo to work with to the program, you can choose one of several options for editing of this image: “Frame” (your picture is inserted into the frames of various topics), “Face Fun” (the face on the uploaded image is fitted as the face of an animal, celebrity or other character), “Artistic” (various interesting effects added to images) and “Collage” (images are gathered into various collages). This is not essential software, but it guarantees some good laughs while processing the images.
7. FILEminimizer Pictures: image compressor
If bulky images give you hard time, resolve this issue with FILEminimizer Pictures. This is a very simple program to use for reducing the size of pictures without losing the quality. This program can also change the format of the output file, send the resulting files by email or upload them to Facebook. You can choose from 3 default types of conversion or go with a custom one (it can be tweaked manually). The interface is very simple and clean; using this program shouldn’t be difficult for users regardless of their experience.
8. Picasa: image organizer
Picasa is a software that is developed by Google and, no wondering why, it offers plenty of integration options with Google, like the creation of web albums, backup of images, uploading images to Google+ and tagging friends and places where the photos were taken. Besides that, it can search for all the images on your computer and show them by years in separate folders, which make Picasa a great way to never lose your pictures. Users are free to add descriptions to images, create and organize new albums, import pictures from external devices, capture media from webcams and external devices, add filters to images, and create photo collages and movie presentations. If you are looking for a great image organizer with advanced options and a user-friendly interface, go for Picasa and you’ll not be disappointed.
9. jAlbum: virtual gallery creator
jAlbum is a software for creating and uploading virtual galleries to your website. Your projects can be seen as a grid with images or you can initiate the slideshow with them. Adding folder thumbnails, applying various effects, ratings and flags, adding description to albums, support of downloading galleries from website – all these features and even more are available with this software. While adding pictures you can change the contrast of colors and brightness, rotate the images, apply filters, cut the edges and straighten the images, which all make this tool pretty sufficient for a quality photo gallery creation. It is most helpful for those users who want to upload galleries online, as this is the major and integral part of this software.
10. PhotoFiltre: image filters and retouch
PhotoFiltre is a software that can help you to add filters to your images. It is a bit more advanced than your favorite Instagram filters: filters of this retouching software can be customized; they can overlap each other and much more. With the help of this software you can add or remove the next values: brightness, contrast, gamma correct, add or remove grey scale, sepia and old picture filter values, soften and blur images, sharpen and reinforce them and even more. So, in theory, you can apply everything; just give to each setting its own definition. PhotoFiltre is great for those who want to apply their own customized filters and not stick to the default ones.
With all the huge variety of the software programs that are available today for free, you can not only apply basic changes to your images like cropping or rotation, but easily create a realistic picture of you landing on the moon. Pick any of the software listed above to improve your regular routine of working with photos and take it to a whole new level.
If only Google updated Picasa to version 4.