Best Free Online Photo Editing Software

Amateur Website Developer Seeks Free Online Photo Editor For Simple Projects

Budding website developers–have you ever been overwhelmed by an onslaught of simple image edits and dreaded the thought of opening more cumbersome digital photography software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop? Small photographs and design elements play a crucial role in pretty much every blog post, website header, and front page slider featured image, but opening up one of the beasts can bring even the smoothest workflow to a screeching halt.

A lightweight editor would be nice, but what I really needed was photo editing that worked for website development. My search for an app to edit photos with usable tools and an intuitive user interface, but without an overwhelming array of cheesy photo effects, brought me to what I believe are the five best free online photo editors: Adobe Express, Sumo Paint, Picnik (often misspelled “Piknic”–another internet tongue twister like Flickr, I guess), Aviary, and Pixlr. Most of these free image editors are integrated with popular online photo hosting services, and some even allow you to store your pictures online. If you don’t need to keep images online and already know how to edit a picture using Adobe’s Photoshop, Gimp, or some other stand alone image editing tool, these lightweight apps might seem a bit fluffy. But don’t be so quick to judge–these free online editors come in very handy in a pinch. Continue reading →

Manage Your Photo Obsession–Tips and Tools For Creating Efficient Photography Workflows

Is the monkey on your back taking over your photography?

I’m addicted to photography, and judging by the incredible response to Valerie Jardin’s post, Can Photography Become an Addiction? at the Digital Photography School, many of you are too. But there’s a cure. By organizing your image collection, streamlining your in camera editing (by this I mean checking photos while you shoot and then deleting any images that don’t make the grade), and using efficient image editing workflows, you can reduce the time spent messing around with your photos and create more time to get out and take pictures! If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a vicious cycle,” you’re starting to get the picture. My goal here isn’t so much to cure you of your addiction to photography, but rather to help you produce better pictures so that the time you spend with your obsession will pay off.

In an earlier post to PhotoHow2 I discussed some of the secrets of organizing your photo collection. I spent years using Adobe Bridge as my photo file browser, and I loved its easy integration with Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. Continue reading →

App Review–Use A Better Finder Rename To Batch Process Image Folders For Mac

After watching Julieanne Kost’s tutorial LR – Be Organized on AdobeTV, I’ve decided to go through all of my image folders and rename the whole lot in preparation for my first import into Lightroom (you can read my “how-to” on getting started right with Lightroom here). A quick Google search found a few apps for Mac that specialized in renaming image files, but there was very little in the way of apps that can handle folder names. I’m OK with cryptic image names for now, but I want to get rid of the date convention that I used to use to mark my individual shoots (my old structure looked like: “20080916_B’s Birthday Party,” but I just want the “B’s Birthday Party”).

I gave A Better Finder Rename a try and it worked great. It’s a small app, with easy to use options for adding or removing text and numbers to files and folders. In a matter of minutes I’d removed all the clutter, and now I’m looking forward to my file names fitting better in Lightroom 3′s left hand panel. A Better Finder Rename costs $19.95, is Lion compatible, and offers a free trial, which limits folder name conversions to ten at a time, with no overall limits.