You may face such a situation when you are in a internet cafe or when you don't have admin rights to install software on the computer. No problem, there are tons of online photo editors to the rescue.
Most of these online photo editing apps are free and offer similar workflows. You upload the image on their server, perform editing like crop/resize/zoom/flip/colorize/apply filters/rotate and then save the modified image on your local hard-drive.
Here we look at some of the popular photo editing tools including GIFWorks, Pxn8 and Phixr.
Phixr - phixr.comPhixr Online Photo editor has a sleek Web 2.0 look n' feel and offers more features than any other tool. The edited photos can be directly uploaded to flickr, fotopic, livejournal, photobucket, fotolog.com, buzznet and dropshots without downloading them to your hard-drive. Phixr lets you edit multiple pictures and stay online for about 3 hours.
Pros:
• Tons of photo editing features including Borders, Red Eye Remover, Rounded Corners, Color Fill, Sepia and more.
• Phixr supports photo upload by email.
• Merge two or more photos into one picture.
• Final image can be saved as JPEG, PDF, PNG or GIF formats.
• Phixr can extract text from image files [OCR].
• Preview effects before applying them to the image.
• Signup is optional and doesn't require an email address
• Clean, intuitive interface with a desktop like app look.
Cons:
• Photo size is limited to approximately 1280x1024 or 1.3 MB for free accounts.
GIFWorks - gifworks.com
GIFWorks is probably the oldest and most widely used online image editing tool in the market.
Pros
• Comes with a wide array of Photoshop like Filters [effects] like Pixelate, Watercolor, TV Lines, etc.
• Allows creation of animated GIF files
• Image Info dialog gives detailed information about the web graphic.
Cons
• Works only with GIF format images
• Some of the editing options open the image in a pop-up window. You may have to turn off the browser pop-up blocker.
• Cannot fetch images from other internet locations.
• Poor interface.
PXN8 [pix-en-ate] pxn8.comPXN8 provides a browser bookmarklet that lists all the images files on any webpage and clicking a particular image will open it for editing in the PXN8 image editor.
Pros:
• PXN8 Bookmarklet save lot of time and hassle. With two clicks, a web image can be opened inside Pixenate.
• Balloon tips show help and tips associated with each tool. Great for new users.
• Editing images can be saved directly to Flickr.
• Save image permanently on the web to webshots and returns a tinyurl of the web address.
• Provided lot of editing filters and fun effects like snow, blur, etc.
• Info Tool shows the mouse cursor co-ordinates.
Cons:
• No preview option available.
• At the time of writing this review, Flickr upload was returning an error.
Pixoh - pixoh.com
Pixoh web interface is the most impressive of all image editing services. You can change the dimension of the image with the mouse as you would do in some desktop based image software. Pixoh also provides a bookmarklet to capture images from any webpage and edit them inside Pixoh.
Pros:
• Pixoh supports editing of big images - up to 10 MB, or 5000x5000 pixels
• Flickr export, or save as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, or TIF
Cons:
• Provides only basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize - no filters or effects.
Conclusion: Best online photo editor
Phixr offers so many sophisticated image manipulating features for free that it can give Photoshop Elements a run for it's money. Pixoh editing style is most user friendly but the service is limited at the moment. Our favorite online photo editor is PXN8 since it has all the image editing features but with a very fast workflow. PXN8 allowed us to grab image from a website, edit it and finally saved the image on webshots without asking for any user credentials.
Resize pictures but no editing
If you just want to resize your images for IM avatars or forum profiles, you may be more interested in online image resizing services like ImageCrop.com or Resize2Mail. They have standard size presets so the final picture is always of the exact dimensions.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/online-photo-editors-compared-gifworks.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
i would say editor.cellsea.com is the best, more features than any of sites you mentioned, and easy to use.
Written on 8/6/06 7:56 AM
Erm, Phixr has this "bookmarklet" as well. And, opposed to PXN8's one, it works on most pages with frames.
http://www.phixr.com/photo/uploadtool
Written on 5/6/06 10:59 PM
You said that with Gifworks "Allows creation of animated GIF files"
That is not the case, there you can only edit animated images, not create them yourself...
Written on 2/8/06 5:01 PM
You should have also compared http://www.online-image-editor.com
There you can make your own animated gifs and most functionality (like adding text, cropping etc..) works on normal images but also on animated gifs
Written on 15/8/06 2:42 PM
You need to check out fotocrib.com, by far the best out there. It's integrated with facebook and flickr
Written on 20/12/06 12:18 PM
phixr is undoubtedly better online image edition solution
Written on 7/1/07 1:09 AM
This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. This project the Ajax technique uses (Web 2.0). Advise
Written on 23/1/07 12:27 AM
The most user-friendly I've found is http://snipshot.com/
Great for public computers.
Written on 1/2/07 12:40 AM
Phixr is now available in spanish - Phixr en español:
http://www.phixr.es
Written on 1/4/07 3:31 AM
Nice web-tools for setting whitebalance http://www.improveimages.com
Written on 17/4/07 2:22 AM
There's also resizr.com -- pretty easy to use for resizing, cropping, and doing png/jpg/gif output. it also will host images and email or SMS/MMS the messages to your phone.
Written on 27/7/07 11:17 PM