Program suggestions

Does anyone know of a program that I can download (that has a trial period to see if I like before I buy) that will meet my needs?
I take pictures of my plants in different stages from seed planting to seed harvesting for my journal, and I want to be able to make a page per plant. I can do this with Microsoft Photo Editor, but I cannot add text, and I have to constantly fiddle around with the resizing of the pictures & it never looks uniform. I had downloaded Averys design pro & was using a label template that had 6 boxes(labels) on it, and I could tell it to make the picture fit in the box. PERFECT! It even let me put in text. Problem? Each page saved on average 35MB and it uses its own extension .zdp that only Avery can open. I have no idea why the pages save so huge, the pics that I am using are only about 1MB each & only 4-6 per page, so THAT is a mystery. I don't want anyone that I send these to (CD of course because at 35MB a page, email is out!) to have to download Avery to view them. I would prefer to save the page in .JPG format. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.