www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

The Gimp is worth a look and it is free and a viable alternative to photoshop, I use Linux Mint rather than Windows but there is a windows version available.

I back everything up in triplicate on external drives, I have been digital since 1998, the only issue these days of course is that rather than 1 mega pixel images tend to be up to 15 mega pixels,

Having had a portable photo hard drive pack up on me in the middle of a trip to France and the contents were totally irrecoverable (losing me about 4,000 photos) I am now very concious of the fact hard drives can die - it's the first failure I've ever had, but was pretty costly when it did happen.

I now have a pair of 1TB hard drives and use a programme called AlwaysSync which synchronise the drives daily, hourly, after every change to the contents at all if necessary, so I always have two identical copies of all my photos. Regular hard drives are about the cheapest form of storage. I'd go for SSD drives if I had the cash however at about £500 a pop for just 256GB It's way cheaper to just have multiple duplicate drives as having two fail is pretty unlikely.

I will now also take two photo storage devices on my travels now to have two copies of everything I take!