Image Editing in the Cloud

Pretend you are vacationing in a foreign country and you have taken a spectacular photograph with your UberMax 15 megapixel camera that you want to upload for your friends and family to see back home.

You decide to use a computer at an internet cafe near your hotel. You take you memory card out of your camera and get ready to email the image. This is when you realize just how large 15 megs is. There’s no practical way to email a 15 meg image. Not only that, you also learn that the computers at the internet cafe don’t have an image editing program. So your can’t crop, resize, or compress your photograph either.

Does this mean you have to wait to get home first?

Of course not, that would make this posting way too short!

Now that broadband internet connection are virtually everywhere many websites have come along that allow you to upload and edit your images in the cloud.

Free online image editors

Phixr (pronounced “fixer”) has a number of tools for editing, like converting to sepia tone, adding borders, red eye removal, and even optical character recognition (OCR). Phixr has agreements with other websites, like FaceBook and LiveJournal, allowing you to upload you image to them after editing. However, Phixr does not store you images, they will be removed within 6 to 12 hours depending on if your a guess or not.

Pixenate, also known as Pixenate, has many features, is very fast with just a two click upload, has an easy workflow, and the ability to upload to your Flickr account after editing. Pixenate says this about itself, “Pixenate is the photo editor of choice for photo printing and photo sharing businesses.”

Resizr offer a free and an inexpensive premium service ($19.99/yr, or $1.67/mo). Resizr offers all the usual tools for simple editing, and an extremely easy way to resize your image using a slide control.

Two other free editors worth mentioning are the Online Image Editor and Cellsea. Both offer free basic image editing capabilities.

Further reading

Techniques for Lighting, Shooting, and Image Editing

Now it’s your turn

Use the comments section below to add to the list of online editors, or to tell us which one you use.