Free and Good Photo Editing Software - GIMP 2

I have been breaking my head recently to find a FREE software which can edit/resize the photos taken by my 5 MP camera. I find it hard to upload these picture for anything on the net. I had trial version MS Office Picture Manager which was great to manage the all the pictures. BUT the trail version which came with my new laptop expired. My wife actually started to use Paint to edit photos she downloads from our camera. But Paint seems too primitive to me. When I was editing photos for uploading some pics for my post, I tried a couple of websites http://www.picresize.com/, http://www.pixer.us/ . However they dont seem to work as good as I like them too. They are good only when editing a limited no of pics (may be one.....). I had lots of them and it took forever to upload. Infact I could never get all the pictures uploaded at one time :). So decided to download something which will work right on my laptop. Finally found GIMP 2. Seems like a good one. It is a GNU Image Manipulation Program and the best thing is it is FREE.