Free software I can’t live without.

There are wonderful free software programs that are indispensable to any artist, or, for that matter, anyone who owns a computer. From font management to batch management to free plugins and anti-spyware programs, I’ve become a bit of a software phreak and have come to depend on a few in a big way.

Here are some of my all-time favorite freebies. I hope that they may be helpful to you in your art and design pursuits, as well as keeping your compy safe

THE FONT THING
This little freebie installs quickly and is not a bloated program. It helps you manage your fonts by installing, uninstalling and viewing them. Easy to understand interface.

PICASA
If you don’t have Picasa yet, you are missing out on one terrific piece of free software. Picasa will scan your whole system (external drives, too) and make it so you can manage, view, edit, find every single image file on your computer. You can even organize your images any way you like. But Picasa does much more than that. It’s an image editor, you can make screensaver slideshows and even mosaics from your images. I adore Picasa. I think you will, too.

VISUALIZER PHOTO RESIZE
Have to resize fifty images all at once? This little program is a keeper. Batch resize JPG images in a folder, and optional subfolders. It supports different aspect ratios, automatic color correction and grayscale conversion, as well as customizable image dimensions and JPG compression level. In addition, you can also embed a small text in the image, add a visible watermark to each, and optionally create a ZIP file containing the resized images.

PIXILLION
There are many times that I have a bunch of files which I want to convert to another format…for example, .jpg to .pdf…in one fell swoop. Pixillion supports .jpg, .bmp, .png. .gif, and .pdf. Nifty!!

KMP PLAYER
I was always having trouble with Windows Media Player and other media players playing every single file format without problems. I’d get “codec” errors (what the heck is a codec and why should I need twenty different ones?) or other kinds of errors and suffice to say, no one player plays every single audio or visual file format without problems. Except KMP. It’s free, has a slick interface and works with every single file format I can throw at it. And I throw a lot of stuff at it. A must have.

ADAWARE ANTI SPYWARE
If your computer is acting wonky—loading and booting slowly, lots of popup windows, unusual error messages, etc, you may have a worm or just some adware or spyware. Or worse, maybe you have a virus, rootkit or trojan. Anti virus software is not always enough to protect your computer from spyware, and spyware can be just as damaging as a virus. Malware Bytes is free, even though they have a professional version. The free version works just great. It will scan your drives and registry and clean up all the nasties, especially the ones every other program misses.

AVG ANTI VIRUS
Personally, I swear by Kaspersky. They are, hands down, the best anti-virus software on the market. However, they do not have a free version–only a trial. If you can’t afford to buy anti-virus software, AVG by Grisoft is the next best thing. They have both a paid version and a free version, and both work extremely well. PC World said AVG performed admirably well (top five) in the toughest virus tests they tossed at it, catching and cleaning even the newer viruses. Highly recommended.

IRFANVIEW
I cannot say enough about Irfanview. What is amazing about Irfanview is that it’s free, and it is far superior to many other paid image viewers, such as ACDSee. However, not too many people know about this wonderful little software, but more and more are hearing about it every day because it’s just the best at what it does. Yes, it is an image viewer. But it’s also an image editor, resizer, EXIF data manager, batch processor and more. I use it for many batch processing commands such as mass renaming or resizing or desaturating, and I even use it to process and download images from my digital camera.

FILEZILLA
I tend to use WS_ftp when I am in a hurry and Cute FTP when I am changing file and directory permissions (CHMODding), but Filezilla is no slouch no matter what your needs and preferences are in an FTP client. Free, intuitive, easy to install, if you want the best free FTP software around, it’s Filezilla.

CC CLEANER
Oh do I love CC Cleaner. Nothing is worse for your computer than a ton of uncleaned registry entries, cookies and temp files. This small, easy to install and run freeware program will clean it all out, and within minutes.