German multimedia specialist MAGIX has released two free photo management and editing packages, each designed to help you get more from your digital images.
MAGIX Photo Manager 10 lets you navigate your photo collection with its thumbnail browser. Automated tools allow you to quickly organise your images into categories, while a "find similar photos" option can search your entire hard drive to locate shots from the same photo session.
The program also supports face tagging; it's not the most accurate we've seen, but if you have a huge collection of photos then it's probably good enough to save you plenty of time. You can also manually organize your photos into albums, and there are options to share them online, or to create video-based slideshows of your favorite shots. (The latter requires you to download another component, but it's easy to do, and also free.)
MAGIX Photo Designer 7 is on hand to take care of your editing needs, and at first glance this looks like a host of other image editors. There are simple photo manipulation tools (flip, rotate), a few basic fixes (optimize color, remove red-eye), the standard list of effects, and that's about it.
Take the time to explore further, though, and Photo Designer quickly reveals some real depth. If you apply the "Painting" filter to an image, say, you don't have to live with the author's pre-programmed settings. If the results aren't to your tastes then you can choose a different brush (there are 29 in total), then tweak its density, relief, placement, size, direction and color, as well as paper and transparency settings, amongst many others.
Other effects on offer here are almost as configurable. And Photo Designer includes several other interesting bonus features, including the ability to automatically create panorama shots from multiple images, and a powerful batch processing tool which allows you to automatically resize, rotate, convert format, and apply just about any Photo Designer effect to a folder full of images in one operation.
Photo Manager and Photo Designer have their problems, then, but they also include many useful features, any one of which might justify their place on your PC. Both programs are entirely free, and they're available for download now.
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