Image and Photo Manipulation Software
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.
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 8. It is a 12 meg download and the purchase price is $50. They offer a free trial version which is probably time limited or feature limited in some way. 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.
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. 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 cute and easy screen capture program. All these program can be downloaded from the FastStone home site The viewer is only 2.9 meg, the resizer is only about 1 meg.
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 the author's home page. 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.