Digital Photos: Print Them, Share Them, Perfect Them

Free Image Editing Software

To edit and organize all of the photos on your PC, you can choose from many free downloadable programs. We tested six of them: Corel Snapfire, Google's Picasa, HP Photosmart Essential, Kodak EasyShare Software, Shutterfly Studio, and Snapfish Photoshow Express. With many easy-to-use features, Picasa earned top honors, but Snapfish's feature-limited free version failed to make our chart.

All save Picasa tie in to a particular Web site for easy upload; Picasa uploads to the Picasa Web Album site and to Google's Blogger.com, and it allows printing from many sites, including Kodak, Shutterfly, and Snapfish. However, you can use any software's editing and organizing features, regardless of which service you use. If you're accustomed to commercial editors, you might miss in these free tools advanced functions that correct individual parts of your photo. Other than for red-eye removal, all the editors we tried work on the entire image.

In HP's Photosmart Essential, a free downloadable program from the HP Web site that also comes with the A616 printer we tested, you get good photo management and fast editing operations. Likewise, Kodak's EasyShare software came with the Kodak snapshot printer we looked at, and can also be downloaded from the Kodak site.

Like the HP software, EasyShare can print to any printer, and has good editing options--but its image management and search could be better. Shutterfly Studio provides top-notch organizing and editing in a well-designed package. Snapfire looks good, as well, but is lighter on searching and organizing.

We also tried The GIMP, a free image editor from gimp.org. Though it has plenty of advanced features, it isn't meant as a photo-organizing and easy-edit tool, so it wasn't suitable for our chart.