It is about as friendly to the inapt as Photoshop (I had an old version of that one time, never could get it to do a thing) I found gimp half way manuverable...not that I ever got anything done with it...except the texture to put as background on my forum...and no, no picture involved...
I had a cheesy program once that came with the flatbed scanner...
Had a couple nice features, naturally nothing in the shape of a photoshop...just minor enhancements...kinda miss it. Simple but good...maybe I still got the disc....
I agree; GIMP is not user friendly for those without a graphic arts background. Maybe a computer graphic arts background... But it IS free!
What are you trying to do? Sometimes it's just as easy to open the photo in something like Paint and make the changes that way. And Microsoft's Photo Editor package has some decent features for simple things like red eye elimination.
I haven't used the program in awhile but irfanview was a good picture viewer and it had some decent editing features when I used it last you can get it at www.irfanview.com.