Free photo software downloads

my experience setting up twg182

I was recently attempting to help a friend learn to use paint shop pro, and used the free study plan offered by webtechu as a guide.

I had no difficulty getting through the class when I took it, but my friend struggled, even with coaching...

I did a little online research to find an easier photo manipulation software that was free. Microsoft is running this "to the cloud" campaign.... I've looked at it, and... I kept looking for something else...

Photo pos pro is a neat piece of software... now offered free, although their EULA still tells us that it's strictly a limited time test... not sure when they are going to correct that... it hasn't expired on my computer...

I've found that you can cut stuff out of the picture easier than psp, you can paint stuff out of the picture very easily... The website offers image mapping at a cost... something that came included in the free psp 7 download...

Psp 7 was the last free download from paint shop pro, I found it a few years ago still being offered on a private website... She now wants people to pay her money to get to that section of her site... dunno 'bout the legal implications of that...

Photoscape makes animated gifs very easily, even easier than psp 7. It makes 1 picture out of several (not a panorama), I normally use note pad for those table type of arangements...

This is one made with photoscape...

January colour, coded with note pad, and then saved by clicking prt scrn....

I still can't do anything with gimp....

I use irfanview more than I use any of the others combined... You can crop, resize, and optimize the pic for the web when saving, all in a few clicks!

Eventually, I was able to coach my friend through the psp course...


And that started my search for a decent photo Gallery for her to display her efforts!

After reading the specs on several free downloads, I chose tiny web gallery.

After downloading, I needed to upload to my site...

I'd never used ftp before... I chose filezilla.
I LOVE filezilla! It doesn't require any smarts! Plug in the info provided by the webhost in file manager, and it's ready to go! I tested it on several free webhosts... with no probs at all...

After uploading tiny web gallery (twg182) to my site, I had to find a way to open it...

Now, please understand, there are complete easy to follow instructions on the site... But I come from the old school of... instructions are for when nothing else works...

Eventually, I found a way to open TWG... It asked that the administrator password be changed... b4 I could do anything else... I found that easily... Then there were some folders and files that needed to be chmod 777... It's explained in the directions, which I wasn't reading...

Setup was amazingly simple even for a complete NOOB like myself... Pages of php that might as well have been greek for all that I understood it... I would have had an easier time of it by simply following instructions, but I found my way around by trial and error, having to delete the software off my site and upload it a gain after making a complete hash of things a couple of times... TWG has a user forum for when you get in a real jam, and Twg's creator is very responsive.

So... after making one for my friend, I added a TWG photo gallery to my site as well.

I think it looks really good, there's a link where my visitors can join and create a folder and upload pics from their gardens...

Setting this capability was explained on the site, and involved a couple of snippets of php code (provided) added to the twg interface...

No big deal for someone following instructions, (I wasn't doing that... instructions are for after I've finished the project) When I added the code incorrectly, the php warning that we've all seen, showed up instead of the photo gallery...

So... I had to go back in and fix the code I'd just added.... I found that I could get into the project in a number of ways, I really liked the easy accessibility. There's the twg interface where you can operate it almost like a wysiwyg... this opens out to see the files... but we aren't limited to that, I went in through the site's file manager to make changes as well as uploading files that I'd made a hash of using filezilla.

The TWG Configuration page has a debug file to let us know which files are screwed up... I delete those files with filezilla, and upload new ones from the original folder on my desktop... Easy!