Gimphoto Portable

Most modern mobile devices are equipped with cameras of such quality that you rarely need to use a digital camera. However, this doesn’t mean you’re going to take flawless pictures, and chances are you want to edit them before sharing or saving. Depending on the purpose, applications like Gimphoto Portable are a suitable testing ground for your ideas, or just the right tools if you know what you’re doing to edit photos.

Just as the name suggests, this is the edition of Gimphoto you don’t have to install on your PC, and can easily carry around on an USB Flash drive to use on other machines as well. One more thing you need to know is that it was created to enhance all features you can find in the popular photo editor called GIMP.

In terms of visuals, the application doesn’t differ much from GIMP, and if it does, we can say it’s not for the better. Sure enough, the general layout of tools and the canvas is similar to it’s inspirational program, but with a bad twist.

A large, empty blank canvas is put at your disposal right from the start, as well as two floating panels that serve as the main tools. One of them is dedicated to plugins, and you can fit it with other functions you find inside the application simply by dragging them there. All sorts of brushes, effects, and selection tools can be found there.

The other is the detailed counterpart. Split in several tabs, it lets you select from multiple types of the same tool you pick from the previous panel, as well as how it performs when used. The good part is that there are an abundance of options to work with. The bad part is they’re poorly organized, and can take some time just to select, let alone get accustomed and use.

Don’t get us wrong, the application is packed with an impressive array and diversity of brushes and effects. All of them bring up a new window so you can configure and preview effects before these are applied. The only thing you need to overlook is the difficult interface. Even the save dialog, which supports a rich amount of image file formats, can leave you scratching your head for a while.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Gimphoto Portable, although comes with an impressive array of features, brushes, tools and everything, needs a lot of patience on your behalf. Portability is an advantage, but not big enough to make you easily overlook the difficult interface, which can make accommodation a real pain, even for experienced individuals.