Irfanview

For all my image-displaying needs I use Irfanview. This program is, IMHO, nothing short of amazing. Small and lightweight (~1MB), ultra fast to load, thumbnail option, slide show etc. You can also do your basic cropping, rotating and adjust colour. It auto-rotates your photos based on the EXIF-data. As of version 3.99 it also has the nice "Auto-adjust colors" function, which does such a good job at judging the white-balance that it would have burned on the stake a couple of centuries before. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some hidden option to make coffee...

No, I do not get any money for advertising this. Really, I don't.

Of course, sometimes your basic global adjustments are not enough, and that's where you see the limits of Irfanview: No layers, hell, only rectangular masks! But I generally don't bother with photos that need this much adjustment - that just means that I fucked up when shooting. If I do have to 'save' a shot then I use the GIMP , because it's powerful and infinitely cheaper the Photoshop and its cohorts.