Nora Brown Design

Three (make that four) online photo editing sites reviewed

After playing around with three four online photo editing services:

• Picnik
• FotoFlexer
• Photoshop.com
• Pixlr

and specifically testing the simple function of uploading, resizing, and saving a photo, overall I am impressed with their capabilities and ease-of-use.

All are free sites (though Picnik has paid options) where you can upload photos and apply a number of effects and edits. Below are my impressions of each service.

Picnik.com

This is my favorite of the three sites. Picnik has straightforward and easy-to-use basic functionality. With a paid subscription ($4.95 a month, $19.95 for six months or $24.95 for a year), you get more advanced editing features. You have the option to upload photos, capture from your webcam, or bring them in from other online photo services.

Even the free Picnik has some really fun effects under the Create > Sandbox tab, contributed by third-party developers. Even these advanced effects seems to be applied very quickly. More than the other sites, Picnik provides helpful but unobtrusive hints on how to use the various tools.

When you’re done editing, you can save and image back to your computer or other online services, or easily send it via email, and Picnik gives you more format options—jpg, png, gif, pdf, and tiff—than the other sites.

FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer also has an extremely easy-to-use interface. For simple uploading, resizing, and saving back to your computer, this may be the easiest, fastest option. No registration is required, and actually it’s kind of difficult to tell how to actually register and login to the site.

FotoFlexer also has a number of cool features like capturing a photo from your webcam, a smart scissors tool that allows you to isolate objects in your photo, and a variety of effects, distortions, and decorations you can apply.

As with the other two sites, you are supposed to be able to pull in photos from other services, but integration with my flickr account did not work—it seemed like some sort of a permissions issue.

You can email photos, save them to your computer (as jpg or png), or, theoretically, back to your other photo accounts.

Photoshop.com

In spite of (or maybe because of) being the leader in desktop photo editing software, Photoshop’s online service feels behind the other two in terms of ease-of-use, responsiveness, and features.

The flickr integration was very easy and worked well, but editing photos seemed a little sluggish and less self-explanatory. There aren’t as many helpful hints as on Picnik, and it’s just a little harder to locate the available options on the page. As with many of Adobe’s other online interfaces, photoshop.com is white text on a dark background, which gives it a more intimidating feel I think. And, there are fewer pre-fabbed effects to play around with.

Photoshop.com’s niftiest feature may be the opening page, where you can manipulate the stack of photos and they interact as if they were physical objects.

Pixlr.com

Pixlr is also very easy to use. It is the most like a traditional desktop application like Photoshop, complete with “File”, “Edit”, and “Image” pulldown menus.

Conclusion: Check out Picnik or Pixlr

In conclusion, both Picnik and Pixlr are excellent options for uploading and resizing images quickly for a blog post or email. Picnik’s integration with other sites may be more reliable, and each have different effects and tools for editing. I’ve made a screencast to give you a quick look at each of these 4 sites: