I was surprised it worked well with XP or Ubuntu. I had some pictures sent through email but they were like six images or more on one file. With gimp I was able to crop out the pictures I wanted to save with different file names. I could even do the jpeg conversion is I wanted to. GIMP 2.6.5 worked very well for me.

great what programs do you recommend for opening gif files. presently using windows 7 and it only opens those files in IE.

I would try gimp; It has a lot of packages for the program.

http://www.gimp.org/

This may help.

http://www.gimp.org/features/

It works with gif.

I never could figure it out. Coming from photoshop probably put me at a disadvantage, but the user-interface always seemed to be missing things I was used to seeing.

But then again, I haven't tried GIMP in about 2 or 3 years.

Gimp is great, although I felt kinda lost in it while using it.

For an easy one and actually a very professional editing program with plenty of tools and addons I recommend Paint.net

This thing is very easy to use and yet it's as almost good as Photoshop:

http://www.getpaint.net/

I second that Gimp is great: I've been using it since I've been using Linux (we're talking about 1998, that's 12 long years) but I reckon it can be very awkward to use for a total newbie. Especially on a Mac it can be very frustrating because you have to click twice every time you switch windows (and you do so very often), on Windows it's ok because you don't have to click twice, and on Linux with the "focus follows mouse" option turned on it's just perfect.

It's like a little Photoshop for free, and although it's no Photoshop, the list of features is impressive for its price. It's got everything you need for web graphics, and then some! And I actually do all of my amateur web graphic work with it.