Picture It!

Picture It! is a simple image editor and can also help you organize your files. Although now deprecated and not being developed any further, there was a time it was very popular. Picture It! was a great intermediary program between the simplicity and the basic features of MS Paint, and more advanced applications, like Adobe Photoshop or CorelDraw. Nowadays, even the simplest software can do much more than Picture It! was able to, but back then, it was a very nifty and practical program to use.

It was also quite ground-breaking as the first consumer-oriented program to be able to create sprites, which was an interesting technology able to draw scan lines without involving the entire video output, making for a very fast and minimalistic way of rendering images. Its manipulation of alpha masking, even with very few computational resources, was also very impressive and unique for such an accessible piece of software.

Since the early 2000s, Picture It! had a few reincarnations and rebranding, coming out again as Microsoft Digital Image. It took a lot of its concepts further, preparing it to face the new millennium and all of the significant digital revolutions that were going on in the last decade. So its life was greatly extended, and the technology behind it remained relevant up until 2007, when the newer Windows Photo Gallery, a totally different program, finally took its place and since then both Picture It! and Microsoft Digital Image is not often mentioned anymore outside of nostalgic users who still try to get it to work on more modern systems because of their personal taste for it.

Picture It! is a very simple, easy to use the software, while still offering a few unexpected features

• Easy but dynamic manipulation of digital images.
• Creative possibilities, going from the most practical to the most artistic ones.
• Supports a wide range of vintage image formats.
• Plenty of special effects and frames for your pictures.

Picture It! is missed by a good number of users, perhaps because of its concept as a middle point between simple and complex, maybe purely for nostalgic reasons, but no one can possibly deny it made a relevant mark at its time.