Picfull is a free online image filter service that can add a variety of filters to selected photos. The service requires no registration; All it takes is to load a photo from the local computer and pick one of the available filters.

The program supports popular image formats such as jpg or png, and will display loaded images as thumbnails on the application website. A list of 20 filters, from pencil and vintage looks to aquarelle, sepia or color separation are available. A click on a filter applies it automatically to the current picture. It is alternatively possible to first select a filter and load an image afterwards, which applies the filter automatically.

Sliders to customize the selected filter are opened as well. Here it is then possible to fine tune the effect further by changing contrast, brightness or saturation values. Available parameters may differ depending on the selected filter. Only one filter can be added to a photo.

A click on Save processes the image which should not take longer than a couple of seconds. The program displays Facebook, Twitter and e-mail sharing options in an overlay on the screen. This overlay can be closed to display the direct download link instead.

Here it is then possible to download the photo to the local computer, and to start applying filters to other photos.

Image dimensions are not changed in the process. Downloads are however only provided as jpg images even if the source image was uploaded in a different image format.

Picful is an easy to use service. All it takes is one click to apply one of the available filters to an image. Sliders and selectors make customizations easy, and the undo button makes sure that you can go back if you have made a modification that you do not like.

While most users won’t mind having a few broken images sitting on their hard drive, others may want to find the broken images to delete or move them. This can for instance be handy if they regularly watch image slideshows on their computer, as broken images might return error messages, break the slideshow or return an empty screen.

Bad Peggy is a Java application that can be used to scan a folder for broken or defect jpeg images. The program will automatically scan all jpg compatible image formats in the root folder and all of its sub-folders.

You select the root folder with a click on File > Scan or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-s. The program will then scan all jpg files in the folder structure.

All broken or defective images are listed with their file name, path and reason why they have been added to the listing.

This can be the reason if a file is not a jpg image but has the jpg extension, or if it is a truncated file. Images can be selected with the left mouse button. The program tries to display a preview of the image on the left side of the screen. This works well for some types of errors, for instance if the file is truncated, which often is caused by a transfer error. Other jpg images may show a blank screen instead.

A right-click opens a context menu with options to delete or move the file. It is additionally possible to export the list of damaged jpg images.

Additional file types to scan can be added via Options > File Extensions. The application cannot scan large jpg images. It displayed error messages when I tried to scan a folder containing digital camera image with a size of three and more Megabytes.

Bad Peggy is compatible with the Windows and Linux operating system. The software can be downloaded from the developer website.

Some users however might find those two programs complicated to use. FreeSizer could be an alternative for some users, despite the fact that it only seems to support the jpg image format.

It is possible to resize images with two clicks. The program displays a drag and drop area for images after startup. You can drag and drop jpg images from your local computer to that area. Each image is shown with its filename, dimensions, size and estimatations about the new dimension and size.

The output images can be previewed individually with a double-click which is handy to evaluate the quality and size after the operation.

FreeSizer is profile based which means that the images are resized and optimized for specific usage scenarios. Available profiles include e-mail, instant messenger, social networks, iPhone and custom. Only the custom profile can be edited under the Settings tab, all other profiles use fix parameters that cannot be changed.

They differ in maximum resolution and quality. A maximum width and / or height, as well as a quality setting (original, high, medium, low) can be defined in the settings for the custom profile.

The settings offer additional options to set a custom output directory. A click on the start resizing button processes all images in the drag and drop area. Images are by default saved into the same directory as the original images, but with different file names.

FreeSizer has several shortcomings that make it a less than ideal product for most users. Among them are lack of support for popular image formats like png, a missing option to modify the profiles and only four quality settings. It should be fine for users who only work with jpg images.

The program is available as a 32-bit and 64-bit edition for the Windows operating system at the developer website.

One of the options to access all photos taken, regardless of where they have been stored or archived, is a image cataloging software like vvvP. Despite the strange name, it turns out to be a very effective solution for photographers and computer users who want a single program to view and work with all their photos or photos they have to manage.

The program stores information about images in catalog files. It stores various information about each image that is added to the catalog.

• A thumbnail image with a configurable size
• EXIF data if available
• The SHA-1 hash of every file
• User comments

The program supports various image formats, including jpg and raw images. It has to be noted that the program does not process RAW images but adds a preview image instead.

When you first start the program, the first thing that you need to do is to create a new catalog on the hard drive. Click the New button or select File > New to save it. This catalog file contains all the information necessary to manage images even if they are not located on fixed or removable drives.

The program differentiates between fixed and removable storage locations. Fixed locations are for instance internal hard drives connected to the computer, while removable locations are for instance removable hard drives or optical discs.

If you want to add photos from fixed locations, you need to select Catalog > Fixed Locations first before you can crawl them. Once added, you can add photos with a click on Catalog > Catalog Images.

Check the “handle removable volumes” or “handle fixed” volumes” first, and pick a folder that you want crawled. The crawling may take some time, depending on the amount and type of files.

All folders are afterwards shown in the main program interface, provided that the right catalog is loaded. It is possible to browse the folders in the interface to see thumbnail previews, image names and other information like the date the image was taken.

The program comes with a search which can be used to search for file names, extensions, start and end dates or descriptions. The search is very fast and responsive.

Images can be added to virtual folders which are then accessible in the program interface as well. Handy for instance to make a pre-selection of photos that are stored in various locations.

One interesting option is the ability to use the image catalog in a network, which effectively means that multiple users in the same network can access the catalog.

The photo cataloging software vvvP is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh computers. Interested users can download the latest program version or the source code from the project homepage.

Image Sorter needs to be installed before it can be used. The program interface looks nearly identical to the one back in 2007, that’s however not a problem considering that it worked well in 2007. One new feature is the ability to load images and photos not only from the computer’s hard drive or a connected storage device, but also from Flickr or Yahoo.

This is done by entering a keyword, title or tag in the search form on the right side after selecting Yahoo or Flickr as the source. Image Sorter will then pull data from the online services and display them in its interface.

If you select hard drive as the source you can use the Explorer module on the left to pick a root folder to display its photos directly in the interface. You need to enable Subdirectories under Options if you want them to be included in the search. Multiple root folders can be selected by holding down Shift or Ctrl.

Images are displayed and sorted based on the selected sorting options and filters. All photos are sorted by color by default, which can be changed to name, size, date or similarity instead. The latter are only available for local images, and not for images that are found at Flickr or Yahoo.

Controls are available to zoom in and out, to display the sorted images in fullscreen mode or to change the background color of the display. Fullscreen reduces the width of the left and right column to give more room for the column displaying the sorted photos. The program window itself retains its size.

File filters and visual filters are listed on the right side. These need to be configured before a folder is selected on the computer’s hard drive.

File Filters:

• Filename – Only display images that contain the characters entered into this form.
• Filetype – Only include photos of a specific type, for instance png, jpg or tif
• File Size – Sort by file size, low, medium and large file filters are available.
• Colors – Filter by colored or black and white photos.
• Orientation – Filter landscape or portraits.

Visual Filters:

• Example Images – Pick images by dragging and dropping them from the image area to the example images module. Image Sorter will only display images that look similar to the selected images.
• Sketch – You can draw in this module to only include images that include a similar pattern.
• Color – Pick up to four colors that should be included in the images.

Images can be selected with the left mouse button. A thumbnail preview is displayed in the interface along with information like the file name, size and dimensions.

A double-click opens the selected image in the default photo viewer. The mouse wheel offers to zoom in and out of the image preview area to take a closer look at multiple images at once.

Left-clicks on images select all of them which is handy as it is possible to copy, move or delete selected images with a right-click and a selection of the desired action in the context menu.

The Options menu at the top contains several interesting preference. It is possible to increase or decrease the amount of images pulled from the Internet (default 150), configure previews on mouse over instead of mouse click or change the spacing between images in the image area.

So what can you use Image Sorter for?

• Find all photos showing a specific person, building or landmark.
• Find themed images, for instance based on color.
• Find photos and images that look similar to a sample image.
• Make pre-selections by loading all photos into the program and using the copy or move option.

Image Sorter offers many different possibilities. The processing speed depends mostly on the performance of the computer, the selected images and filters.

Are there any negative aspects? It would be great if the application would support additional image formats, RAW image formats for instance or Adobe Photoshop PSD files come to mind. It could use a few improvements usability wise as well, for instance by adding an option to apply filters directly to the already sorted images.

All in all however, it is one of the best programs of its kind. Image Sorter worked fine on a 64-bit Windows 7 Pro test system. It is compatible with most versions and editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Interested users can download the application from the developer website.

The Firefox add-on Context Menu Image Saver is different, as it speeds up the downloading of individual images instead of all images on a web page. It does so by adding direct download locations to the Firefox right-click image context menu. A selection of those, saves the image directly without the save as dialog.

The configured download locations appear at the top of the context menu, which makes it an extremely comfortable option to save images quickly to the desired location.

The extension ships with no download directories configured, which means that you need to access the options first to add one or multiple download locations.

This is a very straightforward process. Open the Firefox add-ons manager first by entering about:addons in the address bar, or via the Tools > Add-Ons menu. Locate Context Menu Image Saver in the add-ons listing and select Options.

A click on New can be used to add a new download location for images. All you need to specify is a folder on the local system. I was not able to figure out what the prefix parameter was for. It is not needed to save images directly via the context menu. The prefix is added to the image file name on the local systek. You can add multiple download locations, which is handy if you regularly save different kinds of images to different folders. You can furthermore edit or deleted images, or add a separator which then becomes visible in the context menu as well.

Once you have added at least one download location you can utilize it with a right-click. Context Menu Image Saver remembers the last download directory. You can speed up the saving of additional images further by holding down the Ctrl key before pressing the right mouse button. This saves the image directly without displaying the right click context menu first.

Context Menu Image Saver is helpful for users who download images regularly and selectively. It is compatible with all versions of Firefox from Firefox 3 on. Firefox Aurora and Nightly users need to force compatibility, for instance with the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension.

Pictures are added via the Main > Add Images menu which opens the folder browser. All images of the selected folder are automatically added to the program. Images in subdirectories are automatically included as well. The images are then processed and displayed as thumbnails in the interface. Users need to be cautious in this step as the program can run out of memory if to many large sized images are added.

The core features of Image Tools are all available under the Process menu at the top of the application window.

The following options are available:

• Channels filtering
• Convert
• Crop
• Deborder
• Flip / Rotate
• Resize
• Watermark
• To Grayscale / Negative / Sepia

The user begins the process by selecting one, multiple or all images with the mouse or the Select all button. All selected images are then processed by the application after an image manipulation option has been selected from the Process menu. Configuration begins with the selection of the output folder before available options are displayed in an extra window.

Image Tools is a handy tool for users who want to make one change to multiple images.

A few aspects are not perfect on the other hand. The program lacks previews of the selected change and does not contain options to make multiple changes at once. Users who would like to resize and watermark images would have to load the original images, select resize, load the resized images and select watermark from the options to complete the process.

Image Tools is a free image manipulation software for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the windows operating system. The application is portable on systems that have the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 installed.

The only option to view the image completely is to resize the image.

The Opera extension Make It So does that automatically in the Opera browser. The extension resizes images automatically whenever their resolution exceeds that of the browser window.

The extension works only on images that are displayed directly in the browser window. Images embedded on web pages are not processed by the Opera extension.

Several controls are available to make the viewing of images more comfortable.

The WASD keys flip the image which can be handy if the orientation of the image is not correct. The shortcut B enables and disables a checkerboard background.

Preferences are available to configure various extension settings.

This includes options to stretch small images automatically to fit the browser window, configure background colors for raster and vector images and the transition speed of the scaling.

Opera 11 users can install Make It so directly from the Opera Extensions gallery.
It is possible to click on the image to toggle between the resized view and the original resolution at any time. The image scales with the browser window which means that it is automatically resized if the browser window is resized.

A double-click on the image fits the shorter side to the browser window which usually means that the longer side becomes scrollable.

One way to resolve that issue is the ImageFit add-on for Firefox which has been designed for exactly that purpose. The extension “resizes large images in forum post and webpages” to automatically fit the layout of the site. It “shrinks images down to sit neatly within the existing layout of the page, using the surrounding elements as a guide”.

The developer has created a demonstration page. The effect is best demonstrated by visiting the page once without the extension installed, and then again with it installed.

The image breaks the layout without the extension. A horizontal scroll bar is displayed on the screen which is needed to view the full image on the screen.

The same page with Image Fit installed and activated looks the following way:

The add-on improves the usability of web forums and websites where images that break the layout are often posted. ImageFit is compatible with all Firefox 3 and Firefox 4 releases.

Hover Zoom for the Google Chrome web browser can display larger images directly on hover, on a lot of websites. The extension works fine on websites such as Amazon, Flickr, deviantart, Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Photos and eBay. A general rule of thumb is that it works on sites that link to a larger version of the image directly.

To use it, the Chrome user simply moves the mouse cursor over the image. A popup appears a moment later showing a larger version of that image on the same screen.

The initial delay before an image is shown in a popup, and other settings can be configured in the extension’s options.

Here it is for instance possible to configure a hotkey that needs to be used for the image to be displayed. Other options include configuring a second hotkey so that images are displayed using the whole screen space. By default, Hover Zoom resizes the image to fit the browser window.

Finally, it is possible to change the delay, remove the extension icon from the address bar, remove picture captions in the popup windows, add viewed pictures to the browser’s history and configure sites where the extension should be disabled on.

Hover Zoom can be handy for Chrome users who often want to view the full sized images on sites that display them in thumbnail format.

Driftnet was inspired by the old Apple program EtherPEG and works by watching TCP streams for images and MPEG audio streams. As it listens I dumps the images into a user configured directory and/or it can display the images within a window as they are captured. In this article I will show you how to install and use Driftnet.

Installation

You will fortunately find Driftnet in the standard repositories for both Ubuntu and Fedora, so the installation is simple. Since you will be running Driftnet from command line, let’s install the same way.

To install Driftnet in Ubuntu, follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install driftnet.
3. Type your sudo password and hit Enter.
4. Accept any dependencies necessary.
5. Watch the installation complete.
6. Keep the terminal window open for usage.

To install in Fedora, follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Su to the root user.
3. Type the root user password and hit Enter.
4. Issue the command yum install driftnet.
5. Accept any dependencies necessary.
6. Watch the installation complete.
7. Keep the terminal window open for further usage.

You are now ready to begin using driftnet.

Usage

Driftnet needs to had administrative rights to run. So you will either be running this as root or using sudo (depending upon your distribution). The basic usage of Driftnet is:

driftnet OPTIONS

The common options you will use are:

• -i This determines the interface you want to specific. If none is specified it will assume “all”.
• -d This dictates the directory you want images to be saved into.
• -x The prefix you want to prepend  to the images collected. This is handy when you need to add a date to all images collected.
• -a This will run Driftnet in adjunct mode where no image window is displayed (images are only collected in the defined directory).

Before you start using Driftnet, you need to create a directory that will collect the images. I just create a directory called ~/DRIFT for my image collection. Once you have that directory created you can fire up Driftnet like so:

sudo driftnet -d ~/DRIFT

Figure 1

When you issue this command Drifnet will open up a window (see Figure 1) and start collecting images. As you can see, in Figure 1, I have googled “ubuntu wallpaper” and Drifnet captured those images. The application happens very quickly and as soon as you kill the Driftnet command the images will be wiped away.

A word of warning

Driftnet can consume a lot of your system resources. This is especially true when not running in adjunct mode.

Final thoughts

It’s a slippery slope and can be considered an invasion of privacy. But when you need to see if an end user is viewing images that go against company policy, Driftnet will help you do so.

Fotowall won’t turn you into a brilliant artist, but it will have you creating new and interesting imagery with your own photos or photos from the web in no time. In this article I will show you how you can create interesting wallpapers with this fun tool.

Installation

Installing Fotowall is simple (thankfully you will find it in the standard repository). Just follow these directions:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software Tool.
2. Search for “fotowall”  (no quotes).
3. Mark Fotowall for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. Once installed you can start up Fotowall by clicking Applications > Graphics > Fotowall. When it first starts you will have a blank “canvas” where you can start adding photos and other elements.

Let’s create something.

Creating a wallpaper

Figure 1

We’ll work up a quick wallpaper. When you first start Fotowall the interface seems rather minimal (see Figure 1). Don’t worry, there are plenty of tools for you to work with. You can start with either a picture on your desktop, or a picture found on the web. Let’s find a picture on the web. You don’t even need to fire up your browser. Click on the “Ballon” icon (with the green arrow) and it will open up a search window. Enter your search parameters and click Search. This will pull down a few images from the web. I searched for the word “tree”.  Once you find an image you click and drag it to the main window.

Figure 2

You will notice, on the edges of the image, a few tools for you to use with the image (see Figure 2).  Those are not the only tools available. But with those tools you can resize, flip, adjust the angle, adjust the shearing, and if you click on the Wrench icon, you can adjust much more. Click on the wrench and then click on the General tab. From that tab you can change the border of the image, alter the stacking of the image, add a reflection to the image, and more.

From the Picture tab you can apply various effects to the images From Invert colors to opacity).

The main window also offers numerous tools you can use.  You can add text, a word cloud (from a text file),  as well as some effects.

Figure 3

In Figure 3 I have changed the background color, changed the perspective (do this by clicking and dragging the 4-way arrows on the bottom right of the image), and added a reflection. Very little work for fairly cool results.

Now let’s say that’s all I want to do for this image. Once completed all you need to do is hit the Export button and walk through the wizard. This wizard is going to ask you what type of image you are saving (Wallpaper, Banner, Image, Print, SVG Vector). Depending on what you choose the wizard will change accordingly. A word of warning, should you choose wallpaper, the image gets saved in your home directory and is automatically set as your desktop wallpaper. You might want, instead, to save the work as an image which can then be set as your wallpaper.

Final thoughts

This only scratches the surface of the power and the fun to be had with Fotowall. It’s a very good application for creating artistic images for various purposes. Give this app a try and you might find you have discovered an app to handle a good amount of your image needs.

And although Desktop Drapes hasn’t been updated in some time, the application will still work on recent releases. In fact, I have it working on Ubuntu 10.04.  In this article I will show you how to install and use Desktop Drapes.

Installation

Installing Desktop Drapes is simple. Just follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool (such as Synaptic or Packagekit).
2. Search for “drapes” (no quotes).
3. Mark Desktop Drapes for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. You are ready to run the application.

Preparation

There is little you need to do to prepare your Desktop Drapes. Actually, the only thing you need to do is gather together a collection of wallpaper in a single directory. I place mine in ~/Pictures/Wallpaper. Once you have that ready, you can use Desktop Drapes.

Usage

Figure 1

To run Desktop Drapes you can either click <Alt>F2 to open the run dialog and issue the command drapes or you can click System > Preferences > Desktop Drapes. Either way you won’t see a new window open when you run the command. Instead you notice a small applet in your notification area (see Figure 1).  The Drapes icon is the farthest icon to the left (in Figure 1). In order to set Desktop Drapes up, right-click the icon and select Preferences from the menu.

Figure 2

When you open up the preferences window you will see two tabs (see Figure 2).  In the first tab you add files for Drapes to monitor. You can also, from this same tab, dictate how the image will be presented. You can choose from:

• Centered
• Fill Screen
• Scale
• Tiled
• Zoom

This choice will be applied to all images, so you will want to make sure all of your wallpapers will work with that option.

In the next tab you can configure the following options:

• Startup: Should Desktop Drapes start upon login and should it switch wallpaper on startup?
• Timing: What is the interval for Drapes to switch to the next selection?
• Wallpaper search directory: Where should Drapes monitor for new wallpapers?

Now, let’s say you don’t want to have Drapes manage the time in which your wallpapers are switched. If you want to manually handle this task you can switch the Timing selection to Never (drag the handle all the way to the right) and then you can just left-click the Drapes icon when you want your wallpaper to switch!

Final thoughts

If you are like me, and you like your wallpaper to switch a lot, this little gem is perfect for you. And don’t think that if you are running Drapes that you can’t also manage your backgrounds with the standard gnome-appearance-properties app. You can. But what’s the point in that if you want your wallpaper to change at will?

Developers have found ways to reduce the number of those elements on the image hosting sites. Add-ons like Adblock Plus or NoScript reduce the clutter on those websites so that it is easier to access the images on those websites.

Show Just Image is a userscript that supports almost 100 different image hosts among them popular sites like Flickr, Fapomatic and Photobucket.

The script redirects image requests on supported image hosting sites from their standard pages to the actual address of the image so that the image gets loaded in the web browser without the surrounding page.

Flickr images will for instance be automatically displayed in their largest size in the web browser. The script seems to handle image requests on all supported image hosts the same way.

The script redirects the initial request from the original page after it has been loaded so that the full size image is loaded and displayed in the web browser.

The script is fully compatible with the Firefox web browser. The Greasemonkey add-on needs to be installed. It might also be compatible with other web browsers but this has not been tested.

That might be fine if one or two images need to be downloaded but what about dozens, every day? Download managers and add-ons that can batch download images from websites might be an opportunity but they may as well be overkill for downloading just a few selected images.

That’s where Image Fetcher for the Firefox web browser has found its niche. The browser add-on speeds up the process of saving images in the web browser without making the process overly complicated.

It basically displays a Save link whenever the user hovers over an image on a website for some time. That save link can be clicked on with the left mouse button to save the image to the local computer system.

A file save window is displayed which, to be honest, leaves room for further improvements to set a standard download directory to remove the step of selecting it manually whenever the Save link is clicked on.

Image Fetcher is compatible with all Firefox 3.x versions. The add-on is available at the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Image Ripper is a standalone application that supports batch photo downloads from several Chinese photo hosting sites. It currently supports downloading images from the following image hosting sites:

• duide.com
• heels.cn
• pics100.cn
• tu11.cc
• meituiji.com
• pal.ath.cx
• tuku.keaibbs.com

The photo downloader’s interface is simplistic and easy to understand. It consists of an url field at the top which accepts urls from the sites listed above. The user needs to select a local directory as well which will be used to store the images on the local computer system. Tapping the green button to the right will initiate a page scan. Image Ripper will let the user know if it found any images on the page. The photos that are found will automatically be downloaded to the local computer system.

The program lists all downloaded photos and the current photo in the interface. Thumbnails of the photos that have already been downloaded are also available. Tapping the space bar will display only the current photo in the program window.

Downloaded photos can be uploaded right from the program to Gdrive or Picasa. The first release of Image Ripper is promising, at least for users of those Chinese photo hosting sites. Alternatives are our favorite program Bulk Image Downloader (commercial), the Firefox batch image downloader or the Java application Bilder Herunterlader.

Image Ripper can be downloaded from the project’s website at Codeplex.

A manual control of all images is not likely to yield the desired results, especially if the image count is higher than a few hundreds images.

The only option then is to use a software that can detect duplicate images automatically. And AntiDupl.net is that kind of software.

The software is comparable to other applications that can detect duplicate images like Duplicate File Finder, Visipics or Softchronizer.

It works by selecting files or folders that should be processed by the software program. The program uses the contents of the images that have been loaded into its interface to detect the duplicates.

The results will display pairs of duplicate images with information like the images file name, local folder and difference value. Automatic options to delete duplicate images are offered although those are limited to deleting the first or second image of a pair without options to define other parameters like deleting images based on size, file type or screen resolution.

The scan of all images is on the other hand very fast and it is possible to delete images manually in the results window.

AntiDupl.net is a free software program that can detect duplicate images. It supports the graphics formats jpg, gif, tiff, bmp and png. The program supports all major 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft operating systems and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0.

The image viewer is available in several editions including a portable version and an installer. It supports multiple languages and is completely free for personal use. The main interface of the software looks a bit cluttered and very colorful at first glance. Especially the two icon bars at the top of the window can cause some confusion at the beginning. It is possible to make changes to the skin but not the the interface itself. The designs itself looks professionally done and the three program windows for browsing folders, previewing images and thumbnails are intuitive to use after all.

A click on a thumbnail image will display a larger preview of that image in the preview window in the left sidebar. A left-click in that preview window will zoom in on the image. It is even possible to move around with the mouse as long as the left mouse button is pressed.

FastStone Image Viewer comes with an assortment of image editing tools. Not as much as image editing software programs like Paint.net, Gimp or even Adobe Photoshop offer but enough to perform the most common image editing operations like resizing, rotating, cropping, changing colors, brightness or contrasts or removing red eye effects.

There are also options to perform batch operations like converting or resizing multiple image formats at once. A handful of other interesting modules are available that include the ability to create slideshows, remove JPEG metadata, change timestamps or compare images. The program supports file tagging and is a solid program for these kinds of tasks.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.0 is a fast comfortable image viewer that can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Zilla JPG To PDF Converter is a software program for the Windows operating system that has been designed for this exact purpose. It can be used to convert multiple photos into a single pdf document. The process itself has been streamlined for ease of use. It actually takes less than a minute to configure the program to turn selected photos into a pdf document. The time it takes to create the pdf document itself depends largely on the amount and quality of the selected photos and the processing power of the computer system.

Only two steps are mandatory and a few additional ones option. The mandatory steps are to select photos or folders containing photos that should be included int the pdf document and to initiate the conversion by pressing the convert to pdf now button.

Optional steps include selecting a document title, author, creation date, subject, keywords, the output path and the compression quality.

The result is a pdf document that is made up of all the photos that have been selected during the selection process.

Zilla JPG To PDF Converter is an easy to use program that can create pdf documents showing selected photos in no time. The developer could improve it further by allowing layouts added to the pages that can contain text or other objects. An option to select several photos from one folder simultaneously is also missing as it is only possible to either select one photo or a folder full of photos in the application.

The software program is available at the developer’s website. It is there available for most Microsoft Windows operating systems including Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

• Shutter’s feature list includes:
• Fullscreen, window, area screenshots
• Website screenshots
• GNOME integration with tray icon
• Session collection (each screenshot will be opened in a different tab in the Shutter window)
• Embedded drawing tool
• Upload/Export tool

I have used many tools for screenshots before. Shutter, however, blows them all away. No it is not as simple as hitting the PrntScr button, but it is far more flexible and powerful than anything like it. With that said, let’s install this tool and see how it’s used.

Getting and installing

I will be installing this in Ubuntu 9.04, so this tutorial will reflect that choice. You won’t find Shutter in your standard repository. You have to add the Ubuntu PPA repository. To do this you need to open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

You want to add the following to the bottom of that file:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/shutter/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/shutter/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Once you’ve added the repository you will need to then add the PPA gpg key with the following command:
wget -q http://shutter-project.org/shutter-ppa.key -O- | sudo apt-key add -

With the key added you can now update your sources with the command:

sudo apt-get update

and then install Shutter with the command:

sudo apt-get install shutter

Accept the dependencies and let apt-get do its thing. Shutter will be installed and you are ready to go.

Using Shutter

Figure 1

Basic usage of Shutter is simple:

1. Open up the tool from the Accessories sub-menu of the Accessories menu.
2. From the main window (see Figure 1) click the button that corresponds with the type of screenshot you want to take.
3. Save the screenshot in the filetype you desire

Here are some notes specific to each type of screenshot you will take:

Selection: When you opt to take a screenshot of only a section of your screen the screen will dim and an instructional window will appear telling you exactly what to do. You can scroll in to enlarge a section but this does not appear in your screenshot.

Full Screen: The full screen screenshot will not include Shutter in the picture.

Window:  A hand cursor will appear for you to click on the window you want to take the screenshot of.

Figure 2

For the most part Shutter works exactly as you would expect. There are some nifty features that you might not be aware of. For example, Shutter has an outstanding set of plugins to take advantage of. To use the plugins click on the Screenshot menu and select the Execute a Plugin entry. This will open up a new window (see Figure 2) where you can select a plugin to use. Say, for example, you wanted to add a watermark to your screenshot. You can do this by first taking the screenshot, and then opening up the Plugins window and selecting the Watermark plugin. You can then be specific about what you want your watermark to say, where you want it, and what font size you want.

There are a number of other cool plugins to use. Scroll through the list and play around to see which ones you like.

Website screenshots

Taking a screenshot of a website is simple. Click on the Web button and then enter the URL you want to snag. There is one thing you should know about taking a screenshot of a web site: Depending upon how long the page is, the screenshots can get rather tall. Taking a screenshot of the Ghacks page renders an image that is 1025×3459 pixels in size. Fairly large for a screenshot. Of course you can crop that image to use only what you need.

Final thoughts

Shutter is one of the finest screenshot tools available to Linux. If you haven’t used it you should immediately install it and use it. Be warned, you will wind up spending a lot time playing around with Shutter. It’s handy and it’s fun.