How to edit photos and videos for free in Windows 10

If free photo editing is your game, these Windows 10 photo gallery tips are just for you.

Do you do any photo editing, and if so, what programs do you use?

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It certainly does look like an improvement on previous MS offerings, and may be ok for basic photo editing. I prefer a bit more control, so have been using GIMP for years and am quite happy with it, although batch processing is a feature I’d like to see. I notice a Python Console in the latest version I’ve recently installed, maybe something can be done with that…although I know zero about Python.

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The Windows 10 photo app crashed on me after a Windows update. A bit of research shows that this app has been causing problems for years now, and MS have not done anything to fix it. There are a multitude of threads on the MS Support site with people complaining about this app. Most people feel that it first fails after a Windows 10 update. This could have been some time ago, or more recently. There is no one update that causes the problems. Some writers had more than one devices, of which only one crashed (no info on configurations).

the app crashes differently for different users. For me it crashes about five seconds after starting. Sometimes it opened the picture, sometimes not. Other people manage to open the picture and it crashes when they move on to the next one. It has been suggested that this may just be coincidental, and their app also crashes after a certain amount of time.

I have gone through all the suggested remedies posted on the Microsoft Support site, and in other places too.

Some of the things I have done: I have uninstalled, cleaned out remnants via regedit and MS s/w and Ccleaner, rebooted, reinstalled several times. I have modified various things as suggested by MS this includes resetting the libraries to default. I have also at the behest of a MS tech created a new user profile and started again with a clean install of Photo. Still no good.

I have wasted days on trying to get it working again to no avail.

Some people manage to fix the problem, most don’t. Most of the don’ts on MS Support have said they are looking elsewhere for an app that actually works. I too have installed other free photo editing apps that work like Adobe Photoshop Express & Polarr.

Photo was a good app while it was working, but so far MS seem unwilling to fix it so it is stable.

I hope it doesn’t affect anyone else.

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‘free’ is not a suitable word in connection with unfree software–you can’t possibly know what the real owner of the software does with your data–it is trivially easy to find genuinely free photo editing programs (and batch processing) to use on genuinely free operating systems

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Well, yes… do a lot of photo editing… but simply use one of the free, online websites … one called Be Funky …

Been a big help in regard to putting together my Flickr pages which now have nearly 4,000 images on them.

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Thanks for the comments sharing what everyone is using, very interesting. @gordon, I also use GIMP - very handy. @meltam thanks for the warning on the program crashes, not very helpful when you’re halfway through editing a photo.

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I normally use Photoshop 8 Elements for old family photos and very old family history photos, with reasonable success.

We received a copy of it when we bought our Sony Handycam ln 2010.

Having said that, I have just realised that I have not reinstalled it after I reprogramed our computers earlier this year. image

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For simple video edits, I’ve been using the free version of VideoPad Video Editor for years now. I’m a long-time happy customer :smiley:

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I was particularly disappointed with the video editting on Windows 10. Fortunately I kept my old laptop with Winows 7. Much better video editing capabilities. For photos I tend to use GIMP.

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I would have to put my vote on IrfanView which is free.

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