Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Best Free Portfolio WordPress Themes

   

A portfolio website can be a very valuable asset if you’re creating something awesome and want to share it with the world. With a good online presence, you will be visible to everyone, and your works will finally get the appreciation they deserve!

Luckily, there are lots of great (and free) portfolio WordPress themes available out there. So, to get started quickly, all you need to do is check out the list we’ve prepared for you today. Here are the top free portfolio WordPress themes on the market:

1. RokoPhoto Lite
A modern and very friendly way for creative people - mostly photographers, designers, painters etc. - to show their works to the world. This free portfolio theme borrows a bit of the vintage style, offers a black-and-white design, old-school icons, and classy typography. The portfolio has a blog-like layout, and it displays the items one below the other.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • elegant social icons,
  • full-width animated header,
  • photo-friendly design,
  • lazy loading effect,
  • unlimited colors,
  • SEO friendly code,
  • translation ready.
Price: $0

2. Shapely
An awesome and modern portfolio WordPress theme for creative people and businesses, with full-width parallax header, beautiful parallax ribbons, clean design, and a great portfolio section. Shapely catches your eye with its full-screen modern layout and its elegant appearance.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • Retina ready,
  • full-screen hero image,
  • WooCommerce ready,
  • translation ready,
  • Font Awesome icons,
  • unlimited color options.
Price: $0

3. Asteria Lite
A clean and minimalist business portfolio theme with a multipurpose professional design. It comes with nice animations, a beautiful featured slider, and a great Ajax portfolio. No matter what the type of your business is, this theme lets you showcase your best works elegantly.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • 10 social icons,
  • three page templates,
  • wide layout option,
  • Ajax portfolio,
  • SEO friendly,
  • photo gallery page,
  • translation ready.
Price: $0

4. Portafolio
Portafolio is a simple WordPress theme for portfolios and photo galleries. It has a welcoming homepage with a lot of visuals. The theme has a minimalist yet beautiful and elegant design, and it is very easy to manage. Your visitors will surely appreciate the simplicity.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • custom homepage,
  • custom portfolio taxonomy,
  • custom image gallery manager,
  • related portfolio items count option,
  • unlimited portfolio categories,
  • quick loading structure.
Price: $0

5. Farben
A minimalist full-screen theme for portfolio websites. It has a full-width featured slider, an awesome colorful portfolio in masonry style, image galleries, and a blog layout. Overall, a clean and friendly portfolio WordPress theme.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • various post formats,
  • easy-to-use shortcodes,
  • live customizer,
  • translation ready,
  • Font Awesome icons,
  • advanced color picker.
Price: $0

6. Adapt
Adapt is a multipurpose theme for small businesses that want to make their best works public. It provides a minimalist and clean look, a featured slider, a beautiful and professional portfolio block, a blog layout, and a widgetized footer. The design of the portfolio leaves you a lot of freedom, and you can showcase both your creative works and corporate products.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • drag-and-drop homepage,
  • styling options,
  • portfolio item with featured image or image slider,
  • filterable portfolio page template using Isotope js,
  • full-width page templates,
  • Contact Form 7 support,
  • landing page template.
Price: $0

7. Gridster
A friendly and clean WordPress theme with a grid portfolio on the homepage. It puts your works in the spotlight beautifully. You can add a description for each item in the gallery, and you can filter them by category name as well.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • hundreds of Google fonts,
  • unlimited colors,
  • live customizer,
  • custom logo,
  • social media links,
  • custom widgets.
Price: $0

8. Hatch
A minimalist and simple free WordPress theme for photographers, with a nice grid portfolio. The awesome thing about this theme is that it doesn't come with any distracting elements, so your works will be the first thing the visitors see.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • advanced widgets,
  • Lightbox,
  • translation ready,
  • photo-friendly design,
  • various post formats,
  • theme-matching styles for contact form plugins - Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7.
Price: $0

9. Snaps
A simple portfolio WordPress theme for photographers. It has a minimalist and clean design, with a full-width header and a grid-like portfolio gallery. This theme supports high-resolution images for maximum portfolio impact.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • easy to customize,
  • unlimited galleries,
  • translation ready,
  • page templates,
  • various post formats,
  • custom widget areas.
Price: $0

10. Phogra
A modern free portfolio WordPress theme for photographers, with full-screen slideshows, a slide-out menu, and a dark skin. Phogra has a nice design that allows you to easily switch from one section to another and quickly browse through the content. In short, this theme lets you show your best photos in an interactive way.
Features:
  • responsive design,
  • full-screen slider,
  • Google Maps support,
  • custom logo, favicon, and colors,
  • handcrafted social icons,
  • sortable image galleries,
  • fully editable homepage slider based on custom posts.
Price: $0

Best Android Apps for Photographers

   

The android devices available in market today are equipped with different kinds of cameras. In some cases, you may buy an expensive Android device but still end up getting an average photo quality. If you are using an older version of android even then the image quality remains average. There are various camera and photography applications available on Play Store that will help you click better images and also to edit and beautify the original pictures clicked by you. 

Camera Zoom Fx

Camera Zoom FX is on top of photography apps on Play Store even after it being a paid app. It has several useful features that you won’t find in any other app. Thus it qualifies to be a great app. It is packed with features such as stable shot, meaning it clicks the picture only when the camera is stable to click and clean image and voice controlled shooting mode allows you to click photos on your voice command. Other standard features such as grid, tap-to-snap, etc. will let you click good pre-processed images. Its editing tools are also good providing you various filters, frames, borders, etc. that let you create a best look for your photos.

Camera Fv5

Phone cameras are mostly of fixed type and don’t allow you to control the image aspects manually. Camera FV5 crosses that bridge and allows you to adjust aperture, exposure time, metering time, white balance and a lot more manual adjustments. Using these manual controls you can click exactly what you want to. The editing tools provided such as the selective tool, filters etc are also really impressive. Autocorrect option allows you to get the best adjustment for your images. Conclusively, with this app you can get the best shot.

Pixlr Express

Pixlr Express stands out from all other apps due to its amazing design and simple user interface. It allows all type of users to edit images in a really easy way. Auto correct option allows you to fix all the common errors and with features such as rotate, straighten etc; you can get the best composition. Its filters and effects are laid out in simple pop up boxes which will give you buttons related to a particular type of filters that you can apply and tune accordingly. It helps you to create different moods and environments of the pictures in a single screen interface. It’s a simple yet powerful app for those who are interested in this kind of editing.

Adobe Photoshop Express

This one is for those who are familiar to the most used editing tool on PCs. It provides you with same kind of layer based editing options with various editing tools that are similar to its PC version. Photoshop Touch has been designed for touch screen phones only. Therefore you will find a lot of features of Photoshop not available in this app. Apart from filters and other standard effects you can create new effects by use of brush, strokes, lighting tuning etc. It slows down upon addition of multiple layers and also eats up a lot of battery.

Snapspeed

It is a simple and favorite filter applying application that gives you a wide variety of filters to choose from. You can also apply various effects and frames that will make your images look a lot more creative. Its connectivity with almost all social media apps and account access makes it easier for those who upload their pictures on the go. Apart from filters, various other features are there that make it a good app for example, selective tool allows you to edit only certain portion of a picture and with fine tuning you can adjust various aspects of your composition.

VSCO Cam

An indeed successful app, VSCO is a typical filter based application but with some better and different filters that sets it apart from other applications. Certain creative filters are truly amazing and change the mood of your picture totally. Filters such as retro, Polaroid, etc makes you pictures look stylish. Its editing tools and tweaking options allow you to fine tune the image aspects once you have completed applying effects and filters. It is one of the most user friendly apps that give you best result with lesser taps.


Top Free Email Services

   

E-mail is a very important thing for the Internet users. As a matter of fact, almost everyone that has access to the Internet has an e-mail account. You need it for plenty of things like communicating, sending and receiving money, registering in various websites and many other things. While there are some e-mail services that you could pay for, but why pay for something when you can get better alternatives for free? Yeah, no point of doing that.There are many companies out there that offer you free e-mail accounts.

Yandex Mail

Yandex Mail is one among the free email service providers and is governed by a Russian Internet company. The account holders can enjoy myriad of features integrated with Yandex Mail. Around 12 million emails are processed every day by this email service provider.
  1. Yandex offers unlimited storage space. Once you have signed up with this email service, you will get an inbox with 10 GB storage space. You will get additional 1 GB if your remaining space is less than 200 MB.
  2. 30 MB of files can be attached with an email. If you upload files exceeding the limit, the recipient will get a download link. However, maximum file size that can be uploaded to this email service is around 2 GB.
  3. Yandex includes built-in antivirus software called Dr. Web that could screen and block incoming infected spams and viruses through Spamoborona technology.
  4. You can also get benefitted from the add-ons such as theme options and e-cards. There are also more than 30 themes to choose from.

Inbox.com

Inbox.com is one of the best email services that hit the market with a number of tools and features. This service includes user friendly, intuitive interface with many crucial features optimal for the modern user.
  1. Inbox.com provides 5 GB of email storage which is more than enough to store incoming emails with attachments. So, you can stay away from deleting emails every now and then.
  2. Inbox.com also has a huge number of additional features such as games, custom themes, screen saver, downloads, e-cards and many more.
  3. The security features of inbox.com provide five levels of Spam protection. You can block HTML images, receive messages from the white list, optimize spam messages separately and get them deleted.
  4. Inbox.com allows you to create custom folders using sorting options and specific filters. It also lets you to sort incoming emails by various fields such as from, to, body, attachments and subject.
  5. When you download and install Inbox.com toolbar, you will get alerts on receiving new mail.

GMX

GMX is another email service provider in the top 10 category. Being one of the Top Email Services, it lets you to meet all your basic needs without any complements with the quality and features. This free email service includes message composition, organizers, contacts and many other features and even function properly.
  1. GMX is integrated with Facebook and so, you can pull all the contact data from the Facebook. GMX complies the email address of your friends which are listed publicly on the facebook.
  2. GMX offers unlimited storage space in your inbox. So, you will never run out of space for storing incoming emails.
  3. As GMX makes use of SSL encrypted technology, you can make sure that all your emails are secure and protected.

iCloud Mail

iCloud is one among the best free email service providers with ample storage, functional web application and IMAP access. The users of iCloud Mail services can take advantage of tools for organizing mail. However, it does not support sending emails or accessing to other email accounts.

  1. iCloud offers free email accounts with 5 GB of storage and can be shared with documents, calendars and backups. If you want more storage space, you can purchase it.
  2. You can create new account using iOS and OS X.
  3. iCloud Mail can be accessed through IMAP and is quite easier to set up in iPhone, iPad Mail, OS X Mail, etc. iCloud also works on many other email programs.
  4. The web interface of iCloud Mail at iCloud.com is same as that of a desktop application and can be used with dragging, dropping and swift keyboard shortcuts.
  5. Filters are available for sorting out messages to folders automatically based on the simple criteria. Even messages can also be automatically deleted or forwarded to any other email address.

 Gmail

Gmail is one of the most used and the best free email service providers across the world. It is also one among the popular services offered by Google. This email service boasts myriad of features to benefit the users. The email service from the technological giant Google provides you with a simple user interface. This is one of the major reasons for the people to prefer Google’s product than other email service provider. The prominent features of Gmail free service are as follows:
  1. Gmail offers 15 GB of free storage to the users. This free storage can be used for Google Plus photos and Google Drive. So, you have plenty of storage space to store any kind of files as per your requirement.
  2. Apart from storage, Gmail has also come up with the best security features and so, the users need not worry about the security of their personal data. The security features of Gmail include protection against phishing, malware and HTTPs. It also comes with two step authentication feature and anti-spam shield.
  3. Gmail even comes with productivity features. It is integrated with Google Drive and so, you can attach files up to 10 GB. The emails are optimized in four tabs such as Social, Promotion, Primary and Update. It facilitates both IMAP and POP.
  4. Gmail also lets you to send money but is limited to specific countries now. It also offers apps for Android and iOS mobiles.

 Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is one of the Top Email Services and was previously known as Hotmail. Similar to Gmail, Outlook also provides a simple user interface as that of metro UI of Windows 8. Outlook is known to provide better privacy features when compared to Gmail. The impeccable features of Microsoft outlook are as follows:
Outlook is integrated with Microsoft Office. So, you can easily view or create office files in the email dashboard.
  1. Outlook users can also enjoy better protection against spam and virus as it has integrated virus scanning and spam filtering features.
  2. You can also enjoy unlimited storage, which is one of the amazing features of Outlook. While Gmail offers 15 GB of storage, Outlook offers unlimited storage.
  3. DMARD is also integrated which ensures better security.
  4. IMAP, EAS and POP3 are also supported by Microsoft Outlook.
  5. As social media is integrated with Microsoft Outlook, you can chat with your friends using this email service.

Yahoo! Mail

This is global email program available on the web, mobile devices and Windows 8 with unlimited storage, social networking, SMS texting and instant messaging. It will definitely be enjoyable for the individuals to use the best email services offered by Yahoo! Mail. Here are the features of Yahoo! Mail.
  1. Yahoo! Mail is known to integrate email, social networking, instant messaging, SMS text messaging.
  2. Yahoo! Mail offers free accounts with 1 TB of online storage at Ymail.com, rocketmail.com and yahoo.com.
  3. The users can access to Yahoo! Mail on the web through IMAP and POP. It is also possible to forward mails to another email address.
  4. Yahoo! Mail comes with an excellent feature that lets you to collect junk emails in the Spam folder. You can also report the unwanted emails missed by the filter. Around 200 files can be filtered from the incoming emails. It also provides you with the facility of blocking instant messaging contacts and email addresses.
  5. Drag and drop features, tabs, keyboard short cuts, auto completion of address and other features are included in Yahoo! Mail.
  6. The users of Yahoo! Mail offers web based powerful applications for iPhone and Android.

 AOL Mail

AOL is also called as America Online. Once it was the king of the World Wide Web but, still it remains to be one of the free email services. Let us have a look at the features of AOL email service.
  1. The most impressive feature of AOL Mail is the unlimited storage capacity. You will never have to worry about keeping emails stored in the inbox.
  2. You can attach documents of 25 MB, which is certainly a pretty feature of this free email service.
  3. AOL Mail comes with Span filter in different versions such as Off, high, medium and low. It is recommended to keep the filter at Medium level.
  4. With AOL’s security suite, you can protect your account from emails. You can also enjoy parental controls, spyware protection, parental controls, pop up controls and AOL’s firewall.
  5. With AOL, you can choose your preferred domain name and can invite around 100 friends to remain as the part of the domain.

Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail is highly beneficial for businesses as it comes with a lot of features which are aimed at entrepreneurs. While most of the services are paid, Zoho Mail offers excellent email service for personal use. In order to find the free email account for personal use, you need to spend some time to surf through the pages. Moreover, you will be directed towards creating a business account. Once you have signed up with this free email service provider, you can enjoy myriad of features and they are as follows.
  1. Once you log into your Zoho Mail address, you will be finding a clean and nice interface. One of the beneficial features about Zoho Mail address is that there are no advertisements. This is really uncommon in the arena of free email accounts but it is really an attractive characteristic.
  2. Zoho Mail is all about simple and plain email services. With a simple and intuitive interface, Zoho Mail includes many other features such as contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, links and many more.
  3. Zoho Mail comes with 5 GB of Email storage. Though it is not much, you need not have to worry about deleting the emails every now and then to get some space in the inbox.

Mail.com

Mail.com, which is run by United Internet has hefty unique features and other common features. Being one of the free email services, Mail.com invites you to a homepage stuffed with news from all over the world. The topics include national and local events, celebrity, fashion and finance news. Mail.com includes myriad of features and they include:
  1. Mail.com can filter phishers and spammers and also makes a valuable effort to prevent unwanted emails from reaching the inbox. Even though the filters are not effective, they are good enough and let you to customize the filters to organize incoming mail.
  2. When you sign up for an email address, you can choose from 200 domains that permit you to create a unique email address.
  3. Mail.com gives you the ability of drawing messages from other email services and this feature is called as mail collector. This feature is beneficial for those people with multiple email address.
  4. You can send emails through proxy for other email accounts as well.


Best free backup software

   

Computer's don’t have an endless life, and unfortunately, we depend on them for saving all of our important data but PCs do get corrupt, and hard drive crashing is also a very normal thing, so it’s sensible to back up our data to protect it from such events of misfortune. Thankfully, there are many backup software available that will let you create a complete backup of all your important data to an external hard drive or to the cloud storage. Although, most of these tools are paid, but there are some free software or plans as well. You just need to decide whether the data you want to backup is worth paying for or not.

From viruses and software bugs, to hardware failure or human error, there are many potential dangers waiting to trash your files.
And if the worst happens - you lose personal photos, your music library, important business documents - then that could be a real disaster. Which is why it's a very good idea to back up your PC on a regular basis.
This is never going to be fun, of course, but with the right software it'll be easier than you think. And you may not have to spend anything, either, because there are some great free backup and disk cloning tools around.
Whether you want to copy the contents of your Documents folder somewhere, clone one drive to another, or create a backup image of your entire system, we've found plenty of programs that can help.
So what's the best free backup and disk cloning software? Read on for our recommendations.

1. AOMEI Backupper

Download AOMEI Backupper
If you like your backup programs to be simple than AOMEI Backupper's straightforward interface will appeal immediately. Choose the drive or partition to back up, the destination drive, and a click later Backupper will be creating an image for you.
AOMEI
The program has plenty of power, though, if you need it. There are options to encrypt or compress your backups. You can create incremental or differential backups for extra speed. You're able to restore individual files and folders, or the entire image, and there are even disk and partition cloning tools.
What you can't do, unfortunately, is schedule backups - they must be run manually. But otherwise AOMEI Backupper is an excellent tool, packed with features yet also easy to use.
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2. EaseUS Todo Backup Free

Download EaseUS Todo Backup Free
Just like most free (for personal use) editions of commercial products, EaseUS Todo Backup Free has a few limitations - but the package still has more than enough features for most people.
The program can run both image and file-based backups, for instance, manually or on a schedule. You're able to run full or incremental backups.
EaseUS Todo Backup Free
An option to limit write speed reduces the impact backups have on your system performance. It's possible to individual files or folders, or an entire image via the program's recovery disc. And there are tools to clone and wipe drives, too.
On the negative side, you don't get encryption, there's no differential backup, and you only get a Linux-based disc (not Windows PE). But EaseUS Todo Backup Free still looks like a great program to us.
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3. Redo Backup and Recovery

Download Redo Backup and Recovery
Redo Backup and Recovery is an imaging backup tool with a difference. Instead of installing a program, you download a large (249MB) ISO file, and burn it to CD or USB key drive. Then just boot from it to launch a simple tool which can back up your drives, and restore them later (even if Windows won't start).
There's also an undelete tool, and even a web browser if you need to look for help on your PC problems.
Redo Backup and Recovery
The program isn't exactly convenient, then. You can't schedule backups, they all have to be run manually, and there are very few options.
But it's also easy to use and free for everyone, so if you only want to run backups occasionally - or want a system you can use on any PC, without installing software - then it might be worth a look.
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4. Cobian Backup

Download Cobian Backup
Cobian Backup is an excellent file backup tool with lots of features. You get full, differential and incremental backups, for instance; zip or 7zip compression; AES 256-bit encryption; include and exclude filters; a strong scheduler, backup to or from FTP servers, and the list goes on. Every aspect of the program is extremely configurable, too (there are more than 100 settings you can tweak).
Cobian Backup
PC or backup novices are likely to find this a little overwhelming. If you're more experienced, though, you'll love the amount of control Cobian Backup gives you over every aspect of the backup process.
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5. Macrium Reflect Free

Download Macrium Reflect Free
One of the most popular free (for home use) disk imaging programs around, Macrium Reflect Free delivers a solid, if basic feature set via an easy-to-use interface.
The program doesn't have incremental or differential backups. And you don't get encryption or password protection. This does make creating a backup job very easy, though (choose the source drive, the destination, maybe set the compression level and you're done).
Macrium Reflect Free
There's a capable scheduler; you can mount images in Windows Explorer, or restore them entirely with both Linux and Windows PE-based recovery discs. And overall Macrium Reflect Free is a great choice for anyone who wants a simple but reliable image backup tool.
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6. DriveImage XML

Download DriveImage XML
Free for personal use, DriveImage XML is a lightweight alternative to the more bulky imaging competition. Backup is as easy as choosing a source drive, a destination, and (optionally) setting your compression level.
Restoration is just as simple, and the only significant extra is an option to copy directly from one drive to another.
DriveImage XML
There are some complications elsewhere. Click "Task Scheduler", for instance, and you'll get instructions on how to manually set up Windows Task Scheduler to run your backups. But if you need just a basic drive imaging tool then give DriveImage XML a try.
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7. FBackup

Download FBackup
FBackup is a capable file backup tool, free for both personal and commercial use. The interface is simple and straightforward, and there are a number of features you don't always see elsewhere.
Plug-ins allow you to back up individual programs with a click; there's support for include and exclude filters; and you can run "mirror" backups, which just copy everything without zipping it up (which makes restoring files very easy).
FBackup
Compression isn't so good, though (it's the weak Zip2), and the scheduler is also more basic than you'll see elsewhere. But if your needs are simple (or you're tired of "free for personal use" tools) then FBackup should appeal.
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8. Backup Maker

Download Backup Maker
At first the free-for-personal-use BackupMaker seems like any other file backup tool, with incremental or full backups available, scheduling, compression, encryption, include and exclude filters, and so on.
But interesting extras include support for online backups to FTP servers, and running backups automatically when a USB device is connected.
Backup Maker
The program stores data in Zip files, too, making them very convenient to access. And Backup Maker comes in a tiny 6.5MB download, far more manageable than some of the bulky competition.
If you're a home user looking for capable file backup then Backup Maker could be ideal.
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9. Clonezilla

Download Clonezilla
Just like Redo Backup and Recovery, Clonezilla isn't a program you install: it's a bootable environment which you can launch from a CD or USB flash drive.
And it's seriously powerful, to you're able to create an image of a drive; restore an image (to one drive, or many at the same time); or clone a drive (copy one drive to another), with plenty of low-level control over how this works.
Clonezilla
While Redo Backup and Recovery focuses on ease of use, though, Clonezilla is more about providing advanced options, like "run unattended Clonezilla via PXE booting". It's not complicated - it's probably the best free disk cloning software around - but the program is aimed at experienced users, and backup beginners should look elsewhere.
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10. Paragon Backup & Recovery 2013 Free

Download Paragon Backup and Recovery 2013 Free
Another free (for personal use) version of a commercial drive imaging product, Paragon Backup & Recovery 2013 Free is a good tool with some restrictions.
There's strong support for the basics: you can create image backups (full or differential), compress and encrypt them, use exclude filters to help define what's included, run backups on a schedule, then restore specific files and folders or the entire image.
Paragon Backup
Extras include the "capsule", a separate partition to help keep your backups safe. And a good set of basic partition tools is included, too.
Problems? You don't get incremental backup; you can't clone disks or partitions, and the interface occasionally feels a little complex. Still, Paragon Backup & Recovery 2013 Free is a quality tool, and well worth your attention.
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11. Duplicati

Download Duplicati
If you need online file backups then Duplicati is one of the most versatile tools around, with support for saving files to SkyDrive, Google Docs, FTP servers, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloudfiles and WEBDAV-based storage.
Duplicati
The program can also save to local and network drives, though, and includes plenty of useful options (AES-256 encryption, password protection, a capable scheduler, full and incremental backups, regular expression support for the include/ exclude filters, even upload and download speed limits to reduce any impact on your system).
So whether you're saving files to the web, or locally, there's something for you here.