Online image editors for blogging: Reviewed and rated

By Rich Trenholm on 14 May 2008, 10:16am

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Web 2.0 has seen a proliferation of Web sites and services that, in theory, free us from the shackles of desktop applications. From the streets of London to the foothills of Morocco, all the intrepid webnik needs is an Internet connection and some pixels to share with the world. One of the biggest explosions has put image editing right in our browsers -- just like in our picture -- and today we're rounding up some of our favourites.

Gone are the days when monkeying with photos was the sole preserve of designers and artists with ridiculously expensive copies of Photoshop and the like. Now that even the average Joe has a digital camera and a Flickr or Facebook account, online image editors are here to help us crop out randoms, banish red-eye and even seam carve with the ease of a pro.

We've also decided to put these services to the test on a deeper level than simply tweaking pictures from last night's party. One of the more tedious tasks for the blogger is resizing images for the Web. We may love capturing enormous shiny high-resolution images of the latest gadgets with our digital cameras, but then we have to drop the size and the resolution to 72dpi.

Image-editing behemoths such as Photoshop are clearly overpowered for this kind of grunt-work, especially when opening such programs involves launching it and then heading off for a three-course lunch, a stroll around the park and a quick dip into War and Peace. And when Crave escapes the office, reporting on the most interesting gadgets and gizmos from around the world, we have to perform such tasks on the go, with relatively underpowered laptops. The online image editor seems like a great solution to this problem, so we'll test each of these sites by resizing an image for the Web.

Follow us by clicking on the links as we head out across the Web to find out whether these online image editors are picture perfect. -Rich Trenholm