I have tried a lot of software over the years – both free and paid. Mostly I use them for photos.

Below I’m listing the best I’ve found in each category that are available for free. (I personally use all of the these on a weekly basis.)

Best free viewer

Irfanview

This awkwardly-named but amazing little image viewer has multiple uses.

Irfanview supports an incredible amount of extensions, including .jpg, .png, .ico, .gif,.psd.

You can crop, rotate, colour-correct, and save at a lower resolution. There are handy plugins that you can download to extend the capability of the viewer.

One of the best features is the lightning-fast startup. When you want to crop a photo fast, there’s nothing better.

http://irfanview.com

Best free image Resizer

Pixresizer

You have 300 photos sitting on the SD card of your camera.  You want to pick out the best ones and email them onto your Aunt, but the files are huge!

This is where an image resizer that does batch processing will make the operation a breeze.

Pixresizer, from BlueFive software, is the best of the best.

You can specify the exact size you wish your images or photos to be, or choose from predefined sizes.

Cleverly, it won’t allow you to batch-resize your images in their original folder - you must place them in a new folder.

(because resizing your original precious photos or images is not something you want to do!)

Pixresizer is great for bloggers, because they can get images down to the lowest possible bytes or kilobytes, while preserving the sharpness as much as possible.

http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm

Best free image and photo editor

Paint

Paint.net is impressive.

It has layer functionality, a clone stamp tool, curves adjustment, special effects, and a new ‘soften portrait’ effect which doesn’t take away resolution.

If you are new to graphics programmes or are lost with any feature, there is a paint.net forum to help you on your way.

http://www.paint.net