I've used Paint Shop Pro (PSP) since version 6. I believe that it is a much less expensive workalike for Adobe Photoshop. There was a big revision around version 8 or 9 which made it much more difficult for me to use, but that's probably because I never used the many advanced functions. PSP X4 Ultimate is on sale right now for $49.99 US. Not free, but pretty close for fully featured photo editing and image creation software.

For very basic editing there is Photoscape. It has an image browser which will handle thousands of files and does all the fundamentals: Resizing, cropping, color/contrast adjustment, etc., etc. It's my go-to app for minimalist editing. It is free. There is pretty good documentation online. A small caveat is that it comes with a default setting to save the original of any file you edit in a special folder. That's probably a good thing, but if memory or disk space is limited you should know about it; it can get pretty large pretty quickly.

R.

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."