Webware

Tools that let you edit photos in the Web browser have come a long way in the last few years. We wanted to take a moment to do a feature comparison with a grouping of editors--big and small, to see what each one is capable of.

Most of the services on this list take advantage of Adobe's ever-developing Flash platform, which in its latest iteration got a huge boost with support for the large images coming out of today's high-megapixel cameras. On the flip side of that, several of the non-Flash-based editors use AJAX to make the changes happen without reloading the page. The benefit here is that you can run these on machines without the latest versions of Flash installed.

While not an exhaustive list of features, we wanted to focus on some of the ones that really mattered, like how much each service costs to use, how large of a photo you can upload, and what makes each one special. Here are the results:

Two small caveats about size: In most cases, any difference in the maximum photo resolution is a result of which version of Flash the tool--or the user--is running. In Aviary's case, its Phoenix photo editor uses the Flash 9 spec, thus only supporting images up to 2800x2800 in size. Its next release, due later this year, will nearly double that resolution.

Also, the maximum resolution doesn't necessarily mean if your original photo is bigger, it won't take it. Instead, what many of these services will do is simply scale it down to something that's more manageable both for your machine and its servers. Photos with odd aspect ratios are often constrained within the proportion of pixels any given editing app can render within its available workspace.

So which one is the best?

That's a difficult question. It depends on what you're trying to do. If you want to add glitter graphics to a picture to put on your MySpace profile, you should go with Lunapic. If you're trying to edit the RAW photos you just took on your new SLR, you're only going to be able to do it on Snipshot's paid pro service.

SmugMug, a photo host geared toward prosumer and professional photographers, launched a new service Monday called SmugVault.

As the name would suggest it's all about storage, but not just for the standard slew of files you'll see supported on sites like Flickr or Google's Picasa. Instead, SmugVault is all about the files professional or advanced users end up with, like the RAW and TIFF files from high-end digital SLRs, and the PDF and PSD files from post-processing.

The service is tapping into Amazon.com's S3 cloud storage to serve up all that space, and offering users an unlimited amount of it as long as they're willing to pay. There's a re-occurring $1 charge per month, alongside 22 cents per gigabyte and charges every time you transfer data in and out. In consumer products like Box.net this fee is usually eaten by the start-up or subsidized through a premium plan. Smugmug's hope is that the a la carte model will appeal to the folks who don't fit into segmented plans from other providers.

Squirrel away tons of files in different formats with SmugVault.

(Credit: SmugMug)

However, the real appeal of putting all your files in SmugVault may be that it uses the same visual file browser found in SmugMug. This means you can sort through your photos and videos in a familiar interface. There's also a built-in system to keep you from downloading duplicate files (even if they're different formats) by putting them together by file type.

One thing to note is that potential SmugVault users must have both a SmugMug and Amazon account. SmugMug is only serving as the front end to Amazon's S3, so all of the billing will be done by Amazon. As Allen over at CenterNetworks notes, this is likely going to end up confusing folks who want to keep their paying Web accounts consolidated.

The only upside I can see is that I'd rather Amazon have my billing information than yet another start-up, even if it is one that's been profitable since launch.

(Via FriendFeed)

Adobe Kuler with Flickr image

Although I've yet to find a personal use for it, I've always been intrigued by Adobe's Kuler technology. Most of the implementations we've seen so far, which includes the Web site and integration into Adobe Illustrator, have targeted at generating shareable color palettes from individual user-specified colors or from palette-color drawings. But Adobe extends that to continuous-tone imagery for Flickr users, who can load images into Kuler to generate image-based palettes. John Nack describes how use it (he doesn't explicitly state that you launch it from Kuler, not from Flickr, which confused me for a minute).

The software automatically selects various color points in the image, which you can change simply by dragging the circles. Selecting different "moods" swaps various colors in and out. Maybe it's the images I selected, but I find the different moods produce very similar results. In Illustrator, it can generate palettes based on color "Harmony rules"--complementary, analagous, shades, and so on--and it'd be neat if it could, say, pick the most frequently occurring color in the image and generate palettes by hunting for the nearest color matches within the photo that meet those criteria. The whole idea is also conceptually related to a recently released WordPress theme that does similar color extractions to automate your photoblog design on-the-fly to match your photos.

That said, while playing with the tool I couldn't help but imagine the even neater things Chris Harrison might be able to visualize using a set of palettes returned by the mass of Flickr users. If you haven't seen his stuff, check it out. Pretty amazing.

MagToo is a service for creating really simple slide shows and interactive panoramic photos you can share on your blog or social-networking profile or by e-mail. To help put what you share into context, MagToo also throws in geotagging, letting you stamp any of the content you've added with a specific place where it was taken. Other users can then browse through the items on a large world map like they would photos and videos on Flickr.

Of all the tools my favorite is the panorama maker. While I couldn't get any of the three tests I did to look as good as the example shot, the site offers up a small guide to help get your panoramic-photo-taking skills up to snuff.

Like software that comes with some digital cameras, MagToo will take up to five photos across and several down and stitch them together into a single image. The final result goes into a small viewer that will automatically scroll back and forth, or let you casually pan around with your mouse. It's quite engaging, especially with large photos that have a lot of detail.

One snag I ran into is that it's nearly impossible to add other panoramics you've done into a single slide show viewer without first saving them as their own photographs, then plugging them back in. It's kind of irritating, but easily fixable. Otherwise get used to making panoramics one at a time. The panoramic tool also requires Internet Explorer, as ActiveX fuels the photo-stitching tool.

The service isn't nearly as jaw-droppingly beautiful as ViewAt.org, a geotagged panoramic photo viewer I looked at in September of last year, but it's far easier to compile casual shots into some really beautiful panoramic pictures. You could also just shell out for a DSLR with an $800 panoramic lens, but MagToo will let you get by with that point and shoot you can fit in your pocket.

(Via SociableBlog and MoMB)

Update: Adobe has informed us that while the new Flickr connection isn't live yet, it will be very soon. We will provide another update when we have confirmed that it is live.

When Adobe launched Photoshop Express at the end of March, it indicated that Flickr support would be next on the agenda, and today the company can cross that item off its to-do list. With the capability to round-trip photos into PSE for editing and back out to its site, Flickr joins Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa in the ranks of Photoshop Express supporters. Additionally, users of Photoshop Express albums will now be able to create multiple versions of a given image, a much-requested feature, according to Adobe.

Those announcements probably didn't feel Flash-y enough for the company, though, so Adobe simultaneously announced an embeddable player for virally marketing Photoshop Express posting your photos to home pages and blogs in glitzy slide shows. Given the relative simplicity of the application and broad appeal of photo sharing, this capability also sounds like a natural springboard for companies looking to dip their toes into Open Screen Project development--once Adobe releases the relevant API information, of course.

Flickr has a helpful new way to let you find people you know who have Flickr accounts. It's called find friends, and it will tap into your Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Windows Live Hotmail to cross check those e-mails with Flickr users. When it finds matches it serves them up in a list--all of which require you to opt them in one at a time as one of Flickr's somewhat ambiguous friends classifications.

Assuming you've got accounts for all three, the odds are good you'll be able to discover some people using Flickr you hadn't found through the service's original method that required a little more legwork of befriending people either from their profile pages or searching by single e-mail addresses.

Some Flickr users are already up in arms about the new tool and the fact that it's set as opt-out by default to let you find your friends, but this is a side effect of data portability that's unavoidable unless you're putting up barriers on each end. Matthew Rothenberg, who handles Product Strategy and Management for Flickr has come back, saying:

On the opt-out versus opt-in issue, this is something where we carefully weighed the options, and chose the default option based on what we feel would have the greatest benefit for the majority of our members. Just as we chose to make "public" the default for uploaded photos, we chose to preserve opt-out as the default for people search on Flickr.

Personally, I don't see any privacy violations going on here. You're giving up some of your personal information any time you e-mail someone with a legitimate address. I see other services rummaging through much more of my data. In this case, it's completely in your interest to seek out people you're old friends or contacts with, and the next logical step from Flickr's previous people-searching tools, which clearly weren't up to snuff.

See also: ReadWrite/Web's take on the privacy issue.

Flickr's new friend-finding feature will take your e-mail accounts from three different services and see if your e-mail contacts are Flickr users. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Adobe's VP of Hosted and Consumer Services refers to Photoshop Express as "the on-ramp to the Adobe digital-imaging franchise." Next exit Photoshop Elements? Construction delays? Slippery pavement ahead? The mind reels with metaphorical possibilities. With its familiar-looking organizational tools, slick Flash-based interface and robust retouching algorithms, Express embodies Adobe at its potential finest--this is a newborn beta, after all, and we should expect bugs. (If it should reach senior betahood, like Gmail, we will cease to forgive.) But there are also a few potholes in this on-ramp to beware.

The good: Slick, attractive interface; useful retouching tools and well-done interface for using them; most operations relatively fast.
The bad: Doesn't support photos from 12-megapixel or higher cameras; some unnattractive Terms of Service; no filtering or keywording; no printing options.
The bottom line: Though there's a lot to like about Adobe's first stab at online photo editing and sharing, you probably want to wait until the company fixes a few problems with the beta--and de-fangs its terms of service--before uploading scads of photos to Adobe Photoshop Express.

Ratings:
Design and ease of use: 8
Features: 7
Performance: 7
Policies: 5
Overall: 6.8

Photoshop Express is two things: a photo-sharing site targeting the millions of snapshot photographers who think software such as Photoshop Elements is too difficult, too disconnected or just too much, and a platform from which Adobe will serve partner sites with editing tools. At beta launch, Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa comprise the short list of partners; Flickr will be next in line, though a date has not been announced.

As a sharing site it's simultaneously pretty and functional. And it succeeds as a proof-of-concept that Flash and Flex allow you to create robust online applications that look and feel like local ones. For sharing, the feature set is pretty typical: it lets you upload photos into albums (up to 2GB), organize them, make them public for sharing or share them privately via email links, and generate and email nice-looking self-contained Flash slideshows. There's lots of dragging and dropping to organize, and a free vanity URL.

For editing, it delivers a better-than-average experience. In addition to a more-than-sufficient set of tools for adjusting exposure, color and sharpness and touching up artifacts like red-eye and fixing blemishes, it also supplies a basic set of specifial effects that let you turn bad or boring pictures into something a bit more interesting. The application also displays a snapshot history of your edits, which is a nice touch missing even from Adobe's desktop products. Most of the tools operate relatively quickly; only Distort left me singing the not-so-realtime blues. (For a discussion of the interface, click through the slide show.)

... Read more

2View, one of my favorite tools for adding notes to digital photos recently ceased to exist, and since then I've been wondering if any other services would pop up in its void. Today I've been playing around with Picbite, a wonderfully simple (and slightly similar) way to add small speech bubbles or annotations to photos from your hard drive or from a Web link.

You can add small, yellow notes of any size to images then share them with others. The service provides a direct link as well as embed codes for use on popular social networking sites, forums, and as direct downloads in JPEG and PNG formats. I've placed a small thumbnail sized example of a Picbite I made from our coverage of Under the Radar last year at the end of the post (original shot by Brian Solis).

I don't think it's nearly as fun as 2View was, but with more types of speech bubbles to use, it has got great potential for keeping annotation simple and elegant.

See also: Onesens, Voicethread, and Fleck

[via Delicious]

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that the success of the soon-to-be-released Flickr video depends largely on how much the company borrows from its photo hosting roots and innovations.

While YouTube and various other video hosts I partake in are fantastic for content, the films many people capture on their digital cameras tend to have no editing or post-processing whatsoever. These same videos can be a hell of a lot more interesting when put into context, which is where discovering videos on blogs or people's personal sites can bring a little more to the table than simply plopping them in with the other mass of videos on other hosting sites.

Flickr's popularity, in part is because of its community who are incredibly active and fill the site with a massive amount of content. However, the site's development has remained somewhat stagnant, which is where the inclusion of videos is the single biggest change since its inception. With that imminent change, there's a lot to talk about regarding how video will play into Flickr's current structure.

What Flickr does right

Let's start out with what Flickr video needs to have compared with features the site already has for its photo service.

Flickr's 'interestingness' quantifier might be a useful feature for discovering cool videos. The same process can be seen here for photos.

1. Interestingness: Flickr's killer application is the "interestingness" algorithm. This automates the process of discovering some of the very best photos on the site simply by keeping an eye on natural user activity. If the same thing could be applied to videos, we'd have a much richer selection of naturally popular clips to view without any sort of special voting system or editorial control.

2. Organization: This includes things such as sets, collections, and tags. While nearly all the other video hosts have these features, Flickr needs to let you mix in your video with related pictures from the same set and do it seamlessly. At the same time there needs to be a way to separate photos from videos and browse each type of media on its own.

3. Push video to the API: Another reason Flickr got huge is because the public API, which lets all sorts of services tap into the data and make changes from outside of Flickr. YouTube just released its advanced API and it's the way of the future. As we've seen with services such as Digg over the past year, the results can be exceptionally cool if you let people create tools with your data.

The only thing that keeps me from thinking the company will do this is its stance on letting its members use Flickr as a host without linking back. Flickr may decide to let videos be shown offsite, or without any of the branding, but there may be strings attached--like a branded player with ads.

... Read more