Photo Editing for Slower Computers

I’m a total camera junkie. I love to take pictures, lots and lots of pictures. Artistic pictures, family pictures, fun pictures…pretty much anything within my line of sight is fair game. I also like to play with the pictures after I’ve taken them. Heck, that’s the best part! Luckily I have a fairly new computer that has lots of memory and moves at the speed of light (yeah, not really but it is fast). That means I can successfully use pretty much any photo editing software on the market. But what about people with older or slower computers? Or both. Like my Aunt.

She’s always loved photography. To give you an idea of how long she’s been taking pictures, she has some great shots of her husband as he was getting ready to get on his ship to be deployed oversees during WWII. Yeah. She’s old school. Well now that she’s seen the fun of digital photography she is getting interested in digital photo editing as well. The only problem (well it would be a problem for someone as spoiled as me) is that her computer is really slow. We’re talking horse and buggy slow.

So what did I suggest? Well her very cool printer, Kodak if you were wondering, came with some photo editing software that is pretty nifty. As a matter of fact it is what got me started originally. It has some great basic features without being overwhelming or overly complicated. You can change the tint/colors and do a few special effects but nothing with layering and vectors. Works really well for her and she is happy. Therefore, my suggestion for photo editing software for slower computers is the software that comes with your camera or photo printer (doesn’t have to be Kodak, but that’s what I’m familiar with). Of course, I also suggest deleting pictures you don’t really like so that you don’t use up memory with pictures you won’t use because wow are picture files huge. After all of that deleting, adding, editing, and deleting again you know her hard drive (anyone’s really) gets fragmented so I also recommend frequent defragmentation.

What photo editing software do you like for slower computers? If there is something with more bells and whistles that won’t make her computer slow to a crawl I’d love to hear about it!

Photo Credit Boston Public Library

May 29th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Photo Software | (0)