Joey's Blog

Commercial software is available for every conceivable use, but many of these applications come with a price tag which is too high for most home users or hobbyists. With this high price, typically come bloated features which will never be used by the average user. So, not only are you wasting money, but you are potentially eating valuable resources on your PC. The good news is that there are typically free alternatives with feature-sets that focus on the most common tasks for everyday users. This list will focus on free alternatives — some of which I have used, some I have not. This list will be updated regularly.

Let’s start with a software category I know very well. As co-owner of Gentry Photography, I spend a lot of time using different photo editing packages. Photoshop is the commercial standard, but is loaded with obscure features that I don’t even use. There are several free alternatives to Photoshop for an average home user:

• Not my favorite, but one of the most popular is The Gimp. Originally available only on Unix/Linux, and eventually ported to Windows, this open source project started as a student project at Berkley. This is a very popular tool among the open source crowd. It has evolved over the years but takes some time to figure your way around. The interface is a different than what you may be used to. It is worth looking into.
• Paint.Net started as a student project at Washington State University. It is a Windows only program written on the .Net platform. Paint.Net is extensible (meaning anyone can write plug-ins) and is very easy to use for hobbyist. This program is updated frequently and I recommend it to anyone wanting to get started with photo editing. Here’s a quick article I wrote on the new beta.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is an excellent program for managing your massive collection of photos and videos. WLPG is part of Microsoft’s Live suite of software. This software automatically organizes your photos by date and directory, but it also allows you to assign tags to any group of photos. There are some basic photo correction options like auto-correct, red-eye, and cropping.  You can publish photos to Flickr and Live Spaces (Microsoft needs to add more options here). Perhaps the coolest feature, coming from Microsoft Research, is the ability to stitch multiple photos together to create a panoramic. You simply select the photos you want to stitch and WLPG does the rest. When you take the shots, you need to make sure portions of neighboring photos overlap.

Windows Media Center Edition is one of my favorite applications of all time. MCE is basically a 10-foot remote controlled interface (opposed to 12-inch mouse controlled) to all of your digital media. The primary feature is a built-in DVR, but it also gives you access to your videos, photos, radio, etc all on your TV. Media Center is included in XP MCE and in several Vista versions. If you don’t have the ‘real’ Media Center, then you should check out Media Portal. This is a free application that runs on any Windows based PC. It offers many of the features that Windows MCE has including the remote controlled access to TV, DVR, Videos, Photos, etc.  To utilize TV and the DVR, you will need a TV Tuner. One cool feature that Media Portal has that the native Windows MCE does not, is the capability to ‘skin’ the look of the software via built-in themes.

Windows Power Toys is a collection of free, small utilities from Microsoft which were not included in the XP core code. There are several toys available, but these are my favorites:

• Image Resizer. This is a must have for anyone with a digital camera. This simple utility allows you to resize an image from directly within Windows Explorer by simply right-clicking on the filename or icon. There are three preset sizes (small/medium/large) or you can create a custom size. The resizing is non-destructive, meaning it creates a copy and leaves the original file intact.
• Alt-tab Replacement. Any proficient Windows user uses the alt-tab key combo to quickly switch among applications. I’ve used this shortcut since 1990 in Windows 3.0 and the functionality hasn’t changed since. As you alt-tab through your open apps, the name of the open program is displayed on-screen. This power toy enhances this function and places a mini screenshot of the running app. Very useful.

Another product category I know well is email. In my past life I have been an email administrator for Fortune 500 companies and small businesses. I know Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino inside and out.  Outlook 2007 is an excellent program, but it is overkill for home use and it is definitely not free. Consider these alternatives:

• Windows Live Mail. If you’re still using Outlook Express (XP and older) or Windows Mail (Vista) then you should consider replacing those apps with the new Windows Live Mail. It has support for multiple mails accounts, newsgroups, and RSS feeds. The look is fresh and has some great features like Photo Mail. The single feature that impresses me most is the junk mail filter. (I believe this is the same spam engine as Outlook 2007.) I have mine set to “high” which means it captures anything that remotely looks like spam. You have the option to remove it instantly or quarantine it for review later. I don’t have actual numbers to back this up, but I would estimate that even on high, the false positive rate is less than 1%.  Live Mail also has white/black lists and anti-phishing technology.
• Mozilla Thunderbird is the sister project to FireFox. It’s a good email client that I have used in the past, but it is starting to show its age. Thunderbird still has top-notch junk mail filtering.

Security software can be free too! If you pay for antivirus, then stop. Norton in particular is a resource hog. Having this on your PC will instantly slow you down. Remove any installations of Norton or McAfee (you’ll need the Norton removal tool) and consider one of these options:

• AVG comes in free and premium versions. The free version is an excellent anti-virus tool which won’t bog you down. The premium upgrade includes anti-spyware and a firewall.
• Same goes for AVAST. Both tools are well-written and have daily definition updates.

Everyone has their favorite browser and it sometimes turns into a religious war. I’m not going to compare all the free browsers, but I will list some here:

• Internet Explorer 7 is a good browser. It is missing a few features, but it is a huge improvement in functionality and security from IE6. If you are still using IE6, then visit Windows Update and upgrade. IE8 is in beta now. I used IE6 for about 10% of my browsing; now I use IE7 about 80%.
  • For IE7 users, I highly recommend IE7 Pro. This free plug-in offers a ton of features including some of the nice features of FireFox like inline spell-check and the search bar. It also has a “ForecastFox” type plugin to get weather updates in the status bar.
• FireFox is the open source favorite. Prior to IE7 I used FF2 almost exclusively. FF2 is somewhat of a resource hog, but the upcoming FF3 has a smaller footprint. (My name is listed on the FireFox “Thank You” for some testing I did around 1999.)
• Safari 3.1 is Apple’s entry to the Windows browser market. Safari takes a minimalist approach and by design doesn’t include too many features. In fact, the look reminds of the old Netscape 3 browsers.

Just for fun, I restarted the three browsers listed here and loaded my homepage. This page has a good dose of JavaScript & PHP. IE7 is using 58.2MB of memory, last night’s build of FF3 is occupying 58.6 MB, and Safari is the heaviest at nearly 61MB. I figured Safari would be the lightest.

• Backup Software
  • SyncBack is a free backup/synchronization tool. I use this utility to schedule backups of my wife’s photo work. This is very easy to use and can handle about any type of backup job you can conceive.
  • There is a new class of “cloud” type services that host your backups securely on the Internet. There are all kinds of new features and pricing models available. One such serivce is Microsoft’s SkyDrive. Currently, they are giving users 5GB of free online storage. One benefit of hosted services is the ability to access your files from any Internet accessible computer, including your mobile devices.
• Everyone seems to be looking for good DVD rippers. I’m sure you guys only use this software to make backups of your personal DVDs, right?
  • DVD DeCrypter is the defacto standard. Lots of options, but lots of people have published pages on how to use it.
  • DVDFab is also a nice tool to use when Decrypter won’t rip those dual layer discs. There is a free version and a premium. The premium has presets to rip to IPod, Zune, PSP, etc..

There’s a lot more coming including blog tools, audio/video editing, backup software, etc. If I left off your favorite tool let me know and I’ll add it.

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Posted in Photography, Technology | 9 Comments

9 Responses to “A Huge List of Free Useful Software”

1. on 27 Mar 2008 at 9:30 am1Charlie Owen

   Hi Joey,
   Thanks for the positive comments on Windows Media Center. As a photographer, you might find this interesting: http://www.codeplex.com/powerplaylist.
   Let me know if you have any direct feedback at charlieo@microsoft.com.

2. on 27 Mar 2008 at 9:31 am2Charlie Owen

   Well, it thought the period was part of the URL. Try this instead:

   http://www.codeplex.com/powerplaylist

3. on 28 Mar 2008 at 2:28 pm3Joey’s Blog » Blog Archive » Paint.Net 3.30 Beta 2

   [...] started as a class project at Washington State University (In fact, it is in my upcoming post “Huge List of Free Software”). IThe software is still maintained by one of the original authors even though he currently [...]

4. on 30 Mar 2008 at 6:55 am4NYCandre

   Interesting content – though really the fonts are very hard to read – too small and *defintiely* too dark against the black background. My monitor is about properly calibrated, on a PC. Wll good luck

   (seen via Wordpress forum)

5. on 01 Apr 2008 at 3:39 pm5Joey

   NYCandre-

   Thanks for checking in. I made some adjustments to the color and size of the font based on several readers feedback.

6. on 02 Apr 2008 at 8:26 am6Joey’s Blog » Blog Archive » How to Install a Home Server

   [...] places, and cool new products like Windows Live Photo Gallery can keep track for you. (See my list of free software for info on Windows Live Photo Gallery). When you want to access a photo from two years ago, you may [...]

7. on 15 Apr 2009 at 6:55 pm7James

   Nice list but you missed out a killer program OpenOffice.org (thats the name and the download address) it’s a free alternative to MS Office, it integates with Office formats (sadly excluding the New Office 2007 formats). Its available for Windows, Mac and Linux. I have actually deleted MS Office for this because its so good. It is an Open Source Organisation (hence the title OpenOffice.org) which allows users to edit the programs while being monitored by Sun Microsystems. There is a very nic Add-On available (for free, obviously) called OpenOffice2GoogleDocs which saves and opens documents to and from Google Docs and Zoho, you can also open documents from WebDAV servers (whatever they are). Nic list cannot wait to try them all. One last thing WHY DID YOU NOT HAVE GOOGLE CHROME.

8. on 16 Apr 2009 at 10:53 am8Joey

   James, thanks for the note. I have tried to use OO for years. In my “anything but MS” days I used it and tried my best to like it. However, I can’t recommend a product that I don’t like and I don’t like OO. It seems really old – in fact the look and feel remind me of the MS Office of the mid to late 1990s. I even tried IBM’s Lotus Symphony which is a Lotus branded version of OO. This also didn’t appeal to me. Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept but OO seems like a blaoted cumbersome mess that no one wants to own.

   As far as Google Chrome, it wasn’t available when I wrote the original post.

9. on 08 Mar 2010 at 10:40 am9wu tang

   @James – Google Chrome Sucks but not as bad as Safari. Stick with FireFox or IE8/9. If you’re one of those Opera zealots that’s ok too but just keep it away form me.

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