15 Great Free Utilities You've Never Heard Of

Graphics and Multimedia

Here are tools for organizing your photo and media libraries (and doing much more with them), and for creating your own 3D designs.

Photozig Albums Express

If you've got a surfeit of photos, you'll appreciate this freebie, which organizes your pictures, along with short videos and songs, into albums. You'll be able to create multiple albums, organized the way you want, and easily search and browse for photos with tools such as keyword searching and filters. You'll also find photo editing tools built in, such as red-eye fix, resizing and cropping, changing the contrast and brightness, and so on. There's also a full set of tools for sharing photos, including burning them to CD, sharing them on the Web, or easily sending them via e-mail.

One of the program's nicer features is its customizable interface. Select beginner, intermediate, or advanced, and the interface changes. At a beginner level, it's all graphically based; intermediate and advanced offer the ability to browse via a Windows Explorer-like interface, and to see hidden files and folders.

Download: Photozig Albums Express

MediaMonkey

Not happy with Windows Media Player or your current media player, or are you just looking for an alternative? Then give the free MediaMonkey a try. It's an excellent tool for playing media, organizing your media library, and ripping and burning music. It'll play pretty much every music file that's out there, will synchronize with your iPod and MP3 player, and includes a tag editor. It will also automatically find album art for the file you're currently playing as well. MediaMonkey organizes your music in multiple ways, including by artist, title, album, genre, year, rating and so on. Unlike Windows Media Player, it loads fast.

Fans of Internet radio will like this program as well; it automatically connects you to the Shoutcast and Icecast online radio directories, and plays any stations you want.

Download: MediaMonkey

Google SketchUp

Have you always wanted to be an architect? Or perhaps you are one? Or do you just want to design something as simple as a backyard deck? Then you'll want to give this freebie from Google a try. It's a 3D modeling program that lets you create three dimensional models of decks, houses, buildings, your own home woodworking projects, and much more. It comes with a full set of sophisticated modeling and design tools, and it includes very good advice for getting started. Unless you've used 3D modeling software before, you'll need the help, because this program can be fairly difficult to use. But follow the interactive help, and you'll go a long way toward getting started.

You can do more than just print your models. You'll be able to actually place them in Google Earth. And if you want to share them with others, or to be able to use models that others have created, you can post them to Google's 3D Warehouse. In fact, if you don't have artistic inclinations, you may want to go to the 3D Warehouse as soon as you download the program, and grab models from there.

Download: Google SketchUp