Tech Sense: Photo Tools 2025 (June 2025)

Photo Tools 2025

I believe that I started writing this column in December of 2014.  The following January, I wrote about tools to use on your computer for managing and editing photos.  After I started getting serious about digital photography, I started to load my photos onto my computer and edit them, mostly to fix things like redeye, unwanted shadows, and clipping to a better size.  I bought some software; Kai’s Photo Soap and found a closeout on Corel Draw 4.  Then I found some open-source tools for even photo power.  So long ago, I wrote about three free tools.  This year I have nine on my list including the original three. 

Picasa is Dead

Picasa was a free photo organizer tool for your computer from Google.  At the time, Google was building several useful utilities for computers.  Picasa would scan your computer looking for photos and catalogue based on information if found in the photos known as metadata.  This data includes the date and time the photo you took the photo, the location if it is available, the make and model of the camera, and details about the camera settings.  It also had unique features at the time, facial recognition.  This allowed you to organize your photos by who appeared in them.  Google didn’t send anything to the cloud unless you asked Google to upload your photos to Google to save.

Sadly, Google shut this project down to replace it with the cloud-based Google Photos.  However, the final release still works even on Windows 11.  You can still find the install file online.  I still use it on my computers.

Canon Hack

I bought my first serious digital camera, an Olympus model C-1.  Three years later, I added a small Canon PowerShot A520.  I stuck with Canon for many years.  Sadly, Canon no longer seems to support low-cost point and shoot cameras.  If you have an older Canon camera with a model start with A, FX, or IX you may enjoy CHDK, also known as Canon Hack.  This a software that can be downloaded and installed onto a camera memory card.  It replaces and enhances the read only memory (ROM) in the camera giving the camera powerful capabilities.  The photos possible to take are amazing, including lightning strikes as they happen and capture falling drops of water perfectly still.  CHDK is free and open source, and your camera returns to normal after removal of the CHDK memory card.

Gimp

I have written about Gimp before.  It is a tool for editing photos and creating your own artwork.  It compares to Adobe Photoshop and is the most popular image tool in the open domain.  On any new computer I install, I install Gimp. 

Hugin

I enjoy creating panoramas.  For things like the Grand Canyon, a panorama is the only way to capture what you see.  Many of the popular phones have panorama capabilities built-in. However, I still find I get a higher quality photo with my camera.  Also, the phones can’t stitch both horizontally and vertically on the same image.  Hugin solves this problem.  Hugin is software that can be used to stitch many photos together in order to create a panorama.  When creating a panorama, it is best to use a tripod or other means to keep your camera steady for each image. Take several overlapping photos of the scene you want to capture. Load the photos on the computer and let Hugin stitch them together.

Luminance HDR

HDR means High Dynamic Range.  This is now a common feature on televisions. Your high cameras and movie cameras support it, but your basic point and shoot camera don’t normally.  Creating an HDR image typically requires taking images at several different exposures and merging all of the images into a single HDR image.  You will want to use a tripod to keep the camera steady through all of the exposures.  This is what Luminance HDR does for you.  It takes a set of identical photos; each taken with a different exposure and merges them to create an HDR image.

Your typical JPG file can’t show the HDR image with the full HDR quality, so the program also creates a TIFF image (or other HDR format) file to show an HDR image in its full quality. 

Darktable and Rawtherapee

Darktable and Rawtherapee are tools to edit and export raw images.  A raw image I the internal image used by the camera internally.   Different cameras tend to use different formats for their raw files. Higher end cameras allow downloading the raw images from the camera allowing the photographer more control over the image.  Imagine a film negative as the raw image versus the photo created from the negative.  These tools allow the photographer to make adjustments and edits to the image before committing it to the format desired for any further production work.  These are similar in function as Adobe’s Lightbox.

DigiKam

DigiKam is very similar to Picasa.  It is a photo management system.  It helps in organizing your images, providing the ability to search images based on metadata and local AI driven image recognition.  It also has a facial recognition feature.  It provides common editing features and can batch process changes to multiple images. Overall, it appears to do everything Picasa does and more.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is software to manipulate images.  It is commonly used on the web to modify images for web use.  If an image is being used on a web page and it needs to be resized as the page is made smaller or larger to be used on a phone version for example, ImageMagick can do this in real-time as the image is being requested.  Most web sites then cache the new image to reduce performance impact.  It can also resize, rotate, de-skew, crop, flip or trim an image and do about 100 other useful things. 

Irfan View

Irfan View is basically an image viewer.  It supports a very large number image formats.  It converts images between formats and provides over 100 plug-ins to add more capabilities and convert rare image formats.  I have used this for years to handle some of the bizarre formats I have encountered.  There are other uses like creating slide shows, batch conversion of images.  I once used to help rename a very large number of images based on metadata. 

I recovered the files from a hard drive that was wiped out by a virus.  I used Irfan View to rename the photos in order of camera, then date and time.  The files were placed in folders with the camera name, year, and month folders below that.  Each month folder contained all of the photos taken with the camera that particular month.

Until next Month

You can find any of this software, even Picasa, by searching online.  Everything listed runs on both Windows and Linux and some may run on the Mac as well.  I have personally used everything here except Darktable, Rawtherapee, and DigiKam. 

Have a great June!