Topic: MS Paint - I know, I know, but bear with me for a minute... (Page 1 of 1)

A lot of times while working on my laptop, I don't have Photoshop open, and I need to do some simple photo manipulation. This could be anything from saving to a different format to simple cropping. At this point, I'm usually neck deep in the operating system with literally 20+ windows open. Now, I could open Photoshop, but it would be overkill when all I want to do is save a png as a gif.

Enter Microsoft Paint. It opens quickly and performs simple tasks without the need to startup Photoshop.

Just a little tip to save people some time. At least on my system, when it's running hot Photoshop takes a few minutes to load.

Start->Run->mspaint

Feel free to let the fish fly if this has been posted already.

Personally, I user IrfanView for those tasks. Quick and powerful (a gazillion of fileformats, most basic ops, lossless jpeg rotation), and free as well.

Plus you can hit space to go to the next image in a folder, copy this image into a folder with two keystrokes, view thumbnails etc.

Or if your QuickLaunch is not cluttered yet you could put a shortcut to mspaint in there.

Oh, and instead of clicking Star > Run, press the windows key + R the good thing is it has a history of the things you ran and does autocompletion. Pretty useful to launch calc, charmap, iexplore, ...

IrfanView is slick and fast. Too bad it does not display a checkerboard behind transparent images, and it's not possible to drag and drop files from the thumbnail view into another application.

I haven't used IrFanView in a while. Thanks for mentioning it TP.

winkey + r is a great shortcut, poi. I use it all time. Recently, I came across a cool app launcher called launchy. I've just started using it, but it's awesome for a keyboard junky like myself. It indexes folders you specify and does pattern matching on what you type to launch programs. By default, it will index the programs folders for all users and the current user, but you can point it to any folder you like and specify what extensions to index.