Online Photo Editing

Web-Based Photo Editors

The Internet offers many venues for sharing photos and images. In response to the popularity of sites like Flickr, MySpace and Facebook, several websites have cropped up offering online image editing services that you can use for free. These programs don't require cash, downloads or commitments, however, they do have some limitations. Let's take a look at some of these web-based photo editing tools.

Adobe Photoshop Express

If you want to work with an online photo editing site that is associated with a well known and trusted brand name, then consider Adobe Photoshop Express. This browser based photo editing site is free to use, it allows you to store up to 2GB of photos online and it provides you with many of the most common editing tools offered by Adobe Photoshop products. Some of the tools offered on this site include resizing, tinting, distortion, Pop Color, hue, tint, B&W and sketch. This site also allows you to organize your uploaded images in your own photo gallery.

Splashup / Fauxto

Another free browser based photo editing website that you can use is Splashup, which was formerly known as Fauxto. This is a very basic program that offers more along the lines of drawing and annotation than a full scale photo editing program. However, you can still touch up photos with basic tools offered by Splashup. The best features of this website are that it allows you to work in layers and you can create five unique paint brushes. Splashup also interfaces with Picasa, Flickr and Facebook, but I had trouble getting this to work in Firefox.

Picnik

Picnik is yet another option that you have for free online photo editing. Like the others, this site is browser based, which means you don't have to download anything. Once Picnik is up and running you will need to create an account before you can use the editing tools. The editing tools are pretty basic. There are auto fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color, sharpen and red eye fix options. One of the best features of this site is that there are quick access buttons for sending your edited photos to sites like MySpace, Flickr and Picasa Web Album.

Pros and Cons of Online Photo Editing Sites

I'm finding more and more free software that's totally web-based, meaning that it runs right in your browser, and there's nothing to download. I like this trend, because it really simplifies my life. Nothing to install, and I can access my programs and files from any computer with an Internet connection.

So, online photo editing sites provide you with basic editing and markup tools. This is great if you're away from your home computer and have photos you want to share, or when you don't have photo editing software of your own. Another advantage offered by these sites is that they are usually connected to social network sites and you can quickly send your images to your favorite websites.

On the other hand, while these sites are free, fun and functional, there are limitations to what they have to offer. First of all if you have a dial up connection these sites will be very slow. And as mentioned earlier, the types of editing you can do on these sites are usually limited to basic editing functions. If you're a power user of PhotoShop or other photo editing software, you will not find all the fancy tools to which you're accustomed.

All in all, free online photo editing websites are great to play around with. These sites are still being perfected and some bugs are still being worked out. In the future, you can look forward to many more features and options to choose from when editing your photographs online.

Do you use an online photo editor? Tell us which one you like by posting a comment below...