Online photo editors keep getting better and better. For hardcore image manipulation, desktop software like Photoshop or Gimp will always have its place, but online editors are free, easy to use and a lot of fun. We covered most of the online editors back in February (Fauxto, Picnik, Picture2Life, Preloadr, PXN8 and Snipshot). But a relative newcomer on the scene, Berkeley-based FotoFlexer, is worth a look. The site first launched in July with basic functionality and integration with Facebook. This last week they relaunched a new site with more tools, direct access to your desktop/laptop webcam, and they also now integrate with Flickr, Picasa and MySpace. Upload a photo, or grab one from a supported service, and edit it by changing colors, adding effects, bulging or pinching areas (to make body parts look larger or smaller), etc. You can also turn any image into a sketch or cartoon. I spent about 10 minutes creating the different versions of the picture to the right (original is top left). The most fun is changing hair color, although the image third down on the left is my personal favorite. Fotoflexer says they incorporate their own artificial intelligence algorithm to figure out the right way to alter images. And whatever it is they’re doing, it works. You simply point out a few areas of the site you want to remove or alter and it figures out the rest of the pixels pretty quickly. You can do all of this in Photoshop, but it takes a lot longer. And unlike most (but not all) of the online photo editing tools we’ve previously covered, FotoFlexer also supports layering for more complicated image editing. FotoFlexer also now integrates directly to your webcam and to take a quick snapshot and edit it. Many of the effects are similar to the Photo Booth application that comes installed on all Macs. The integration with third party services is a great feature as well. Pull down photos from Facebook or another service, alter them and re-upload in a few minutes. The service runs in Flash and was built on the Flex platform with mostly custom tools. The company has not raised any capital and has 15 employees, all in the Silicon Valley/Bay area. About 50,000 people use their Facebook application and/or the website directly. I expect that number to grow as social networkers discover the joy of turning their pictures into → Read More
Y Combinator held their fall bi-annual Demo Day today at their Mountain View office. The fall demo day featured a whopping 19 companies giving lightning fast 7 minute elevator pitches to a room of press and potential angel investors. The companies were earlier selected during their Summer application drive. Paul Graham started off the event briskly after an initial mixer, encouraging investors to close deals fast on the 11 week old companies. Here’s a look at the presenters (note, some of the 19 companies declined mention in this roundup): Anywhere.FM We announced Anywhere.FM’s launch earlier last week. They compete in the online music locker space. However, I find a lot of these sites are more a niche segment of the storage market than a full application. Anywhere.fm is a more consumer friendly music storage solution and has set dead aim at being an online version of iTunes. Anywhere.FM’s site lets you upload your music collection onto their site, create playlists, and play them back anywhere from the web. You can even listen to your friend’s music on a “Buddy radio station”. You can easily start your library with an iTunes uploader. Over the past two weeks, they have received over 125,000 visits and had over a million songs uploaded to the site. Today they expanded on their monetization plans, which include advertising, affiliate sales, and premium accounts. They plan on inserting audio ads into your music stream and are in talks with TargetSpot to supply local audio ads. The player’s Buddy radio feature will serve as a discovery engine, which they can sell music through and generate affiliate fees. Finally, a paid premium account will provide higher quality bit rates and other TBA features. ClickPass ClickPass is making OpenID one-click consumer friendly. They declined to state greater details for now. DropBox DropBox is another entrant into the online storage market. They are creating a transparent file management system (Mac/Win) that aims to: sync your desktop files on the web, back up files, provide access anywhere, and make files easy to share. Although they are still in private beta, they showed an example of their product for the Mac. For the demo they showed how files stored in their desktop Dropbox folder were accessible and synced online. Your Dropbox files are backed up online, with a version history to provide easy rollback, and recovery in case you delete them from your → Read More
The launch of Picnik a couple of days ago brought us yet another online photo editing tool. Like Fauxto, Picnik uses Flash, whereas most of the earlier editing tools all use Ajax for in-browser editing. Since all computers come with basic software that rotates, resizes and crops photos, there needs to be a compelling reason to use an online service. Uploading a photo to such a service, editing it and then downloading it back to your hard drive too high of a cost. To compensate for this, most services allow you to transfer the edited photos directly to Flickr, Webshots or other online photo services, saving users the trouble of making round trips uploading and downloading. Most of these online services also offer editing tools that go beyond simple rotation, resizing and cropping and start to creep into Photoshop territory. Here’s a few of the better ones, along with our most recent testing notes: Fauxto Fauxto is a Flash-based Photoshop look-alike. It is the only layer-based online tool that we know of, and is by far the best of the bunch. But if all you are looking for is photo editing, and you aren’t familiar with Photoshop, Fauxto will frustrate you with its complexity. And if you are already familiar with Photoshop, chances are you have a copy already. Fauxto is lovely to look at and it is a really nice example of Flash in action, but I’m not sure who their target market is. Picnik Picnik is the new kid on the block, and they’re the best so far. It is also Flash based, it is the fastest of the bunch and the user interface is the most intuitive. Once you are done editing, you can transfer your photos directly to Flickr. Picnik has replaced Ajax-based PXN8 as our favorite online photo editing tool. Picture2Life Picture2life is an Ajax based photo editor. It’s focused on grabbing and editing images that are already online. The tool selection is average, and the user interface is poor. There are some bugs on the site. Photos can be transferred to Flickr, 23 and Imageshack after editing. Preloadr Preloadr is a Flickr-specific tool that uses the Flickr API, even for account sign-in. The service includes basic cropping, sharpening, color correction and other tools to enhance images. The fact that Preloadr is designed specifically to work with Flickr may not be an advantage – some → Read More
