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Web-Based Photo Editor Roundup
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a roundup of 5 web-based image editing programs. The mostly Flash and AJAX-based webware ranges from simple touch-up services like Snipshot to the Photoshop wannabe Fauxto. They vary greatly in interface and extra goodies; some offer bookmarklets for getting images from a web page you're browsing, some offer artistic or goofy effects for you pix, but all fear the specter of Adobe's online version of Photoshop on the horizon."
in using a web browser like some super whizz-bang do-it-all application framework.
AJAX & Flash suck, but there's nothing wrong with the thin client idea. It's being held back by MS & bandwidth issues at the moment.
If Netscape had won back in the day, maybe we would have a better web based thin client framework now, but to suggest that the idea is unworkable is ludicrous.
Okay so while its nice to have some basic stuff on a website I'm really not sure how this makes sense given the rise and rise of multi-core CPUs (which are fantastic at image processing). Models like Picassa and others which have a download to the machine make more sense as they don't require you to buy a massive amount of server hardware to support your business model.
Sorry I've just realised... its Web 2.0 bubble isn't it, it has to be in the browser because otherwise its not cool.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
there's nothing wrong with the thin client idea
There's nothing wrong with thin clients for certain applications. There is a lot wrong with the silly idea of using a damn web browser as the platform for a thin client. Javascript and XHTML are not an application framework. They're for drawing pretty web pages. Compare any Web 2.0 "framework" with a real GUI toolkit: even a retarded chimp can see just how terrible an idea all of this Web 2.0 stuff is. Really, what is the fascination with it? Even Java would be a better idea for this sort of stuff!
This seems like a silly place to use a web application, since your photos normally reside on your computer. Uploading a two-to-three megabyte file just to run some simple corrections that are handled by dozens of already available tools (including many free or preloaded ones like iPhoto and Picasa), then downloading it again...
Java would be the ideal solution if Sun would get off their asses and A)Make cut/paste work (even if it necessitates putting up a huge "warning this is a security risk" window before letting you do it the first time) , B)Make the allowable heap size MUCH larger for applets , and C)streamline the process of letting users save and load files to their computer (again with the whopping huge security warning windows)
All of this WITHOUT forcing users to accept certificates to give applets carte blanche, which I never trust on websites.
I guess it could work if you could upload very high quality pictures in an instant without any quotas
...
But as you implicitely said, we are nowhere close to that level
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
It makes more sense when there's an actual reason for it to be on the web. For example, CleVR stitches photos into panoramas, then uses a flash thing to display them and embed them in other pages, youtube style. It's like Apple's old Quicktime VR, but without the $500 authoring environments and plugin and embedding nightmares.
The idea seems to fit with Google Apps. How long before they buyout one of the companies or try something similar from scratch. If not raster images, I still think they'll get a vector editor going or at least a Dia clone.
itentionally left blank - see comment title
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Maybe you should have read the post above mine before responding to mine. He was saying that the web-based photo editor would be used by people who won't purchase photoshop, download picasa, or even use the free one that came with their camera. This is a person that obviously has absolutely no interest in using a photo application to do -anything- to pictures. You obviously are not in this category and his statement was not aimed at you at all, and so neither was mine.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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I am testing the "Photoshop Elements 3" trial, yes the older version on my OS X. I am definately impressed by the coding quality and the ease of tools.
If Adobe "ships" Photoshop Elements 3 kind of stuff to Web and asks for $$$ , count me in.
Notice Photoshop Elements 4 for Mac didn't ship yet so I won't tell about 48bit TIFF editing offered with it etc.
What can Adobe do to kill project from beginning? One small font sentence at bottom: "IE Required".
Between this and the other threads talking about Photoshop moving "online", there is a hell of a lot of misconception that surprises me from this crowd.
No, these clients don't do the image processing on the remote server. Yes, it would take masses of bandwidth. They use simple, easy to implement algorithms that run on the client machine. Most of these are written in Flash, hell, Photoshop Online will be written in Flex. Why bother making a heavyweight client app, then send the images to the server for processing each time?
They're not.
It runs on the client-side.
This isn't difficult to understand.
Why? Because nothing on the net will ever compare to an in-system, RAM-based, N-layer handling, real-time nondestructive effects engine written close to the metal with live geometric warp layers, masking and animation. That's on the application end.
One the user end, these web based apps are meant for your grandmother. And at that, only on days when someone else in her apartment building or upstream on her cable connection isn't downloading "300" on bit-torrent, and there aren't 200 other people on the same server trying to process an image. The entire idea of "thin clients" for image manipulation is one that presumes bandwidth and server power that are not available at this point in time - it's silly, is what it is.
You can buy a great image manipulation system for about $30 if you simply look hard enough. You'll be able to level photos, retouch them, or process the living heck out of very high resolution images if that's your intent, set people on fire, morph them, all manner of sophisticated things. Or you can use a web app and move a slider and wait... and move... and wait... and save... and wait... and finally get back your pic. Which you had better hope is what you wanted. When I say you'll get it back, I mean after that "300" download finishes, of course. :-)
So here's what you should be asking yourselves: What is your time worth?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Hi there, Just wondering if anybody else remembers the venerable Image Magick Studio? Hours of fun to be had there and definately prior art to anything Web 2.0 :)
I think you have an "off by one" error there. Elements 4 is the current version on the Mac, with 5 on Windows. To be honest, if the delta between 4 and 5 is as little as that between 3 and 4 then you're probably not missing much.
Adobe have been pretty smart about choosing which features to include in Elements -- enough to keep me happy most of the time but with a little nag at the back of my mind thinking, "What if I upgraded..?" I trust they'll do something similar for the web version.
I've been using digikam recently and I have to say I'm very impressed with it.
First off its free and offers all the photo manipulation stuff you're likely to find online and secondly its organisational abilities are extremely useful - including location based organisation. It also uploads stuff to Flickr and other places really simply.
I haven't tried out any of the products, but it's safe to assume they do most of the work client-side and therefore they must have some Javascript image manipulation functions. I wonder if any of those exist as a free/open resource. For a long time I've been looking for a Javascript JPEG library which would allow me to scale an image client-side before uploading it to a CMS. Sure, server side checks and manipulations are available, but there's really no point in uploading a three Megabyte digital camera picture to a community site which won't show the images larger than 800x600 anyway.
Has anyone ever accomplished something like this?
If they don't want to do anything to photos, why are they using the online photo program at all?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That list is hardly complete. There are others, the biggest probably being lunapic.com. Some things are just easier to do, lunapic for example has a lot of animations and fonts that you wouldn't normally have. Obviously, for high quality photo editing, you'd want to stay local for now. But, with bandwidth ever increasing, the online editors slowly get better and better.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
- embed into a CMS, or any other app. that has images as a content item
- embed in a personals/community site, so uploaders can crop/resize their uploaded photos themselves, or content admins. can do it on the fly (just FYI, I built one of these for a company and productivity increased about 600% vs. download/Photoshop/upload)
- any photo submission site, so you can access / edit them from any computer anywhere (like holiday photos from the hotel in Mexico on the 8-year old PC in their lobby)
- any online form that requires a photo upload
For the ones that are trying to replicate/steal market share from Photoshop, that probably's a long way off, but for now there a lot of uses for an online image utility.A little imagination is all that is required...this list took about 30 seconds and I'm sure there are many $$$$ ideas that could grow out of this little segment.
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I don't mind if you piss into the wind, just let me know before you do it...
Although I don't doubt that these projects are sincere, their actual value is in testing the limits (and hopefully expanding the limits) of online GUIs.
I mean, why bother posting about this things being slow as all get out? Anyone who has ever used any heavy flash or poorly designed AJAX app knows these things crawl.
The thing is, the basic feature set for an app like photoshop is more-or-less stabilized. The issue with putting it online is one of overhead. Sure, it will always be slower then something kissing the ICs, but that's not going to be relevant if the application requirements stay approximately constant while hardware progresses. Give it 5 years. Online software will explode.
My wife wants to resize a picture to put on her Yahoo group site. So she Googles "shrink picture", and one of the top sites that she finds doesn't just *tell* her how to do it with some software, it *offers* to resize the picture for her, for free.
We probably have five or more programs on our machine that could have done the job. But the above was *way* faster than it would have taken her to find one of them and figure out its interface.
And I have to confess, it may have been faster than it would have taken *me* to do it with a local program. I'm sure it took less clicks/keystrokes.
...in the coffin of a slowly dying Photoshop Phriday?
As Photoshop and other tools have gotten into the hands of folks who don't design for a living, the quality of this once-hilarious feature has gone down. The recent giant pets theme was just...well, something awful.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
...the head of an image processing and fx software company, I can tell you one thing with certainty: Online apps that transfer photos back and forth and process them online are the very last thing on our list of technologies to be concerned about.
It's not going to stay that way. Much (if not most) of the processing will be done on the client side. Using Javascript/Canvas, using flash, maybe even Java Applets. I know this because I'm working on an app that does a limited amount of image editing via the first means -- it's a huge pain because of cross-browser differences and because the Canvas is still essentially bleeding edge, but that'll change, and the other two technologies are more mature, and what people try to do with them is only going to increase. You might see the final image apply transformations in a batch manner on the server side, but that's one round trip, something people are probably going to be fine with.
This isn't to say that desktop software will go away -- I agree that for professionals, desktop software will likely always have features unavailable in online products. But for an awful lot of everyday simple stuff, I suspect that web apps will indeed become compelling.
Tweet, tweet.
If they aren't going to use the software that comes with their camera, they surely aren't going to sign up for a web-based service that does the same but is a lot more hassle.
Hassle test - person wants to shrink photo to put on a website:
Scenario 1:
Realize you never installed camera software. Hunt for it. Find it. Install it. Figure out how to use interface. Shrink picture.
Scenario 2:
Google "shrink picture". Click #1 result, "http://www.shrinkpictures.com/". Use the tiny, super easy web form to upload your picture and shrink it.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/12/photoshop_and _multicore.html
Multi-core processors may not be as fantastic as you thought.
Too bad you posted as AC. You are on the money.
I'm sure these are all nice offerings, but at the moment will offer no serious competition to the gold standard, Photoshop.
In fact, even an online version of Photoshop will not be competition to its current incarnation.
The reason? Browser color management. Currently, only Safari, OmniWeb, & MacIE support it, and any serious Photoshop user soft proofs before printing.
Their only current solution would be to bypass the browser display engine, but if they do that, they're in effect back to having a stand-alone app.