Owbist - you articulated the decision factors beautifully. And that is what makes it difficult. Presently, all I do is load it on the camera and crop. I know I would like to be able to do some color/contrast/tone/brightening adjustments, be able to edit out troublesome aspects. Eventually, I would like to be able to clean older photos and change colors (I know I would have loved to have been able to change the colors of the walls in my house to assist with paint color choices). Whether I'd ever get to something like swapping heads or filters, I don't know (I don't even know what filters are). Another aspect that is important to me is good photo organizing tool. I've been reading reviews of software editing programs (many free), and the reviews don't even mention organizing photos. I'm not sure if that's bc. they all do it, so it's not the feature worth reviewing, or bc. they don't do it. By the way, this review site is very useful - for all kinds of digital photograph questions. I'll post the link here in case others are interested: http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/photography/articles/4488.aspx. Now if I knew how to make a tiny url of this, I would have done that. I think I even have that firefox addon, but don't know how to use it yet. I think I'm going to try Photofiltre first. Paintnet also looked good, as did photoscape. All are free. Does anyone here know photoscape? A couple of more questions, if that's okay. 1) why would someone want to resize a picture? 2) what's the advantage to having a card reader get the photos on the computer, rather than just connecting the camera to the computer via USB? Thanks everyone. Lynn.

fFor photo editing I have found that "Photoscape" is without question the most powerful and most user friendly program that I have ever used. PHOTOSCAPE is a free download from Google and it is totally free of spyware, malware or the other none sense we commonly find with free downloads. to find a download site just put the name photoscape in your homepage search bar.

Hi slim, I am going through the same dilema in that the laptop I want is a Vista 64 Bit system and am worried my photo programs will not work on it. Looks like we are getting shoved into 64 bit OS now whether we want it or not? Wished the one I want would be a 32 bit or at least a choice like the Toshiba ones offer. Hope you have good luck in finding a program to use.

Thank you for your response. I used Picture It for easily selecting images from pictures (like plants) and adding them to other pictures, for a very realistic effect, perhaps for a landscape plan. I haven't seen anything that works as well for that as well as for a few other nice features. Would irfanview do a good job of that, do you think? I'll look it up. Thank you.