Image and Photo Manipulation Software
rev. 9-10-2010

To assist AMC members that might want to submit photos but are having difficulty in manipulating their digital photos, here is a little discussion on programs that I have used and might be suitable for others to try out. These software programs might be useful to those that are currently using some other method and would like to compare their current method with the ones that I find useful. (These are Windows systems only. If Mac users have favorite comparable programs, contact the webmaster)

• The image viewer and editor that I have been using for many years and is still my favorite is ACDSee. This is an old program that has been around many years and is an established favorite. I currently use version 4 and version 7. Version 4 is half the size of version 7 and is much quicker loading. It has all the features that I need. Version 7 has easier to use cropping and editing tools, but the final results are pretty much the same as version 4. Unfortunately version 4 is not available. The current version offered is version 12. It is a 60 meg download and the purchase price is $70. They offer a free 30 trial version.. If you do a lot of photo manipulation I think the program is worth the price.
• For those that do not wish to purchase software, there are free (for non-commercial use) programs available that will do most of the manipulations that the commercial software will do. But there is no such thing as a free “full” lunch, but there are free “light” lunches out there. After downloading many of the popular free programs and looking at them from the standpoint of ease of use, intuitive controls, and being able to do simple manipulation on groups of files, here are my recommendations.
• Picasa is a commonly used photo program offered by Google. It seems to do everything, but in the process ends up being a huge program that probably does more than you want. If you have a lot of photos on your computer, it will go through and index all the photos as thumbnails, including videos. It is a free Google program and they are an advertising venue. Built in features such as emailing photos, creating Gmail or Web Albums accounts, are all geared to acquiring you as a consumer. Like all Google applications it is a professional type program that requires you to take time and look over carefully to see if all or any of the features are useful to your requirements. I personally do not use it, preferring to use less complex tools. One of the features that is handy is the ability to create a simple webpage for photos with thumbnails. The final result is similar to the one that I use on the Narragansett Chapter website Photo Album pages, derived (but edited for specific committees) from the free program Xnview.
• FastStone Image Viewer has most of the features needed for manipulating your photos, including adjusting contrast, gamma, light table sorting, renaming, etc. It also does image rotation and resizing (but not batch). These are the most used and needed features, since most digital cameras take huge 1-3 megabyte images, and people rotate their cameras often for vertical photos. FastStone also has a separate image resizing program which is quite complete on all the features. Probably a little more than the average user needs, but between these two programs, you can do almost anything needed with digital images. They also have a easy screen capture program ($). All these program can be downloaded from the FastStone home site.
• For a small really easy program to just resize photos to a suitable size for submitting to the AMC, you can not beat “resize.exe”. It is a stand alone program ( does not need the usual installation into Windows), is only 338K bytes, and has the four most important controls. It can do blocks of images, it allows control of the jpeg quality, it allows you to select a destination folder, and it has a built in image viewer. Get the program from this download site. You will have to unzip the file. Put the program anywhere and make a shortcut for your desktop. That is all that is needed. It can only do bmp and jpeg photos, not gif or png, or any of the other many formats. But most digital cameras output jpeg photos. Note that this program will not rotate those vertical photos.