Need your opinion on photo editing software....

[coffeebreak]

Well it is confirmed....Microsoft Picture It 2001 can no long exist! I have done the search for help and done everythign suggested and nothing works so the program is obsolete.

In searching for a new one.. I notice on Amazon.com that they have them, but they are all downloads. I assume I buy, they send me the info to download it to my PC instead of sending me the disk and I do that.

Does anyone have any experience or know about how this works and all? I mean, okay so I download it to my pc. Now...is the program there forever? Do I have to be online to use it? What happens if I need to reinstall it someday? what if I have a crash or for some reason have to do a system restore to prior to installing/downloading this software, how do I get it back? I assume it saves the pictures to my hard drive where I tell it to? Can the pics then be used anywhere like on a blog, here on this forum, on Facebook or Etsy places? I use Flickr sometimes and save those images to my hard drive.

I see some freebies to download. I don't need alot, just copy, adjust and save pictures from my camera SD card or an image from online that I want to save and as mentioned above places like here, etsy etc. Do the freebies do this okay and again, what happens if I need to reinstall....I know I can just go do that again as it is online, but what happens to the pictures I have saved already? If hte program crashes or leaves...does it "take" my pics with it? Can I still use the pics I have saved on my PC if I don't have that photo software or are they "lost"?

I just had to get new PC and it is Windows 7...none of my old stuff works!

Thanks for any comments and helps. I am not a PC techie person...give me a 35mm camera and a Walgreens and a pen and paper and a stamp....oh, and a few photo albums!