Ashampoo Photo Commander 17

Note: It is recommended that you first create and sign in to your personal software account and then bind the license key to your account to activate the software on your device, so that you can reset and reactivate it directly from your software account when you change to a new device in the future.

Ashampoo Photo Commander is a one-stop tool for organising, browsing, editing and sharing your digital images.

The program opens with a powerful thumbnail browser. This supports a good range of formats, including PSD, many RAW variants, MPO/ JPS 3D images, even (new this time) WEBP. Every image is displayed along with its key details: resolution, colour depth, aspect ratio, DPI, EXIF and DMP tags. You can filter your photos by type, age, name or tag, rate them with a click, then organise them into virtual albums for easier reference later.

Photo Commander provides several automatic optimisation tools. It can fix contrast and colours, remove noise, reduce compression artefacts and more, or you can apply the whole lot in a couple of clicks.

The real power comes in the manual edit, though, where you can crop or resize an image, straighten horizons, remove redeye, repair scratches and apply various special effects, either globally or with a pen for pixel precision. A dual-view mode means you can see the "before" and "after" images side-by-side.

An excellent vector editor helps you customise your images with lines, arrows, callouts, text, clipart-type shapes and more.

If you're feeling creative then Ashampoo Photo Commander enables you to share your images as calendars, collages, greetings cards or HTML albums. (It can burn your favourite pictures to a CD or DVD-based slideshow, too.)

The program isn't done yet, though, and more features keep appearing everything you look. There's a duplicate file finder, for instance. A screen capture tool, a panorama creator, even a set of batch processing tools to tweak, rotate, resize, add watermarks, or otherwise adjust an entire folder of pictures in a single operation.

Photo Commander identifies known devices, remembers previously imported photos, can copy or move files to the cloud (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive), or send files by email - no other email program required.

A much-improved vector editor now supports curved arrows, curved and point lines, custom outline styles, gradient fills, smarter access to object styles and far more intuitive editing controls.

Effects and tool tweaks include a smarter flood fill, with support for filling by colour tolerance. The Colour Accent effect allows you to click on one colour and have that remain, while everything else is greyed out. Manual white balance similarly alters the white balance of your photo based on a single click, while you're now able to select and cut out an object from a photo, make parts of an image transparent, or exchange transparent areas with another photo.

Elsewhere, there's enhanced file format support (open multi-page PDF, save as PSD), completely redesigned Wallpaper and Slideshow wizards, smarter use of hardware acceleration, full support for Windows 11, and a completely redesigned image browser with multiple monitor support.