One of the online services that can be used for that is Web Resizer. The picture optimizer supports images up to a size of five Megabytes that can be loaded directly on the service’s homepage. Web Resizer will automatically process the uploaded image and display an optimized version of it. This new picture is displayed to the original one so that both can be compared on the screen.

The service will furthermore display the new size of the picture and the image reduction percentage. The controls at the bottom can be used to further optimized the result. It is here for instance possible to change the output image quality, sharpen the image or change the color saturation and contrast. Web Resizer will then reprocess the original image and display a new processed picture on the page.

One interesting option is the ability to compare even more image variants by enabling the “compare image sizes” checkbox. This displays the image in various picture quality settings on the screen. The results are fine for most purposes but the most professional environments. Webmasters who want to optimize the pictures on their websites can access Web Resizer here.

Open Image is a portable software program that requires barely any configuration. Pictures can be downloaded by creating a new download task in the program’s interface.

Picture downloads can be instantly started by adding a website url in the Page field. It is furthermore possible to change the download folder and set minimum and maximum file sizes as well as allowed file types to only download pictures that are not filtered out by the rules.

A few additional options are available in the Settings menu like renaming images with sequence numbers, emptying the download folder before starting the picture download or opening the download page in the default web browser

Open Image is a good alternative for downloading pictures from single web pages that contain many pictures. A good alternative for download pictures from multiple pages is the website ripper HTTrack.

The script will display a small ORG overlay in the upper left corner of each thumbnail which is the clickable direct link to the full image on Flickr. This does not work on all thumbnails but on most. Not working thumbnails are for example those where the uploaders prohibited direct links.

A click on the ORG overlay will open the image in full size in a new tab in the web browser. Users might want to edit the allowed websites and pages of the userscript to add websites that they visit regularly where Flickr thumbnails get posted. The author of the script did include a handful of sites including Flickr obviously.

Surprisingly though not all Flickr pages are included in the website list. You might want to add an entry like http://*.flickr.com/* to the list of allowed sites to include all pages on Flickr.

The Firefox add-on adds an option to upload any image to a Photobucket account to the Firefox right-click menu. The process is effective and simple. The user needs to be logged in or log into Photobucket during the first upload. This is not necessary again as long as is logged into the site which usually means per session or even longer.

A right-click on any image will display Upload to Photobucket entry which can be used to send the image right to the Photobucket account. The user will be notified if the upload was successful by an overlay bar on top of the page. This bar displays two additional buttons which can be used to view the uploaded image or to open the Photobucket album organizer.

The Photobucket Upload add-on can be downloaded on the Mozilla homepage.

The collection centers around five areas called People (Kennedy, Picasso), Places (Times Square, New York), Events (Vietnam War, Winter Olympics), Sports (baseball, football) or Culture (Railroad, Cowboys). It is possible to enter any search term which is usually good enough to find many images related to the keyword.

A click on an image will display a larger thumbnail and additional information about it including the location or date taken. The very same page contains links to related images and an option to purchase it as a framed photograph. A click on the image will load it in full size in a new window.

Image resolutions range from 800×1280 to 1280×1280. Could be a nice idea for a present or as a background wallpaper for the PC.

Google Image Search can also be used to search the Life Photo Archive exclusively by appending the source:life parameter to the search.

Format plugins will add support for image formats that are not included in the main release. About 35 image format plugins can be downloaded from that page. Most of them are exotic formats like jng, wic or bmf which most users probably never heard before.

The plugins can be downloaded separately or as a plugin pack and have to be unpacked into the XnView plugin directory where they will be automatically recognized by the image viewer.

Add-ons on the other hand add support for external services like Imageshack, Nero, archive or ftp support. It usually means sending pictures to another application or adding new functions in XnView like viewing images in archives or adding basic image editing support.

The add-ons and format plugins add new features and functions to XnView which could be interesting for some users.

The 150 images will be displayed in a zoomable and movable area. The mouse wheel can be used to zoom in and out of the area to inspect images closely. Pressing the left mouse button in the area makes it possible to move around which is handy if some images are not displayed because of the zoom level.

It is also possible to use the zoom slider on the right sidebar to zoom in and out of the main area. The second step is the refining phase. The user drags and drops images that fit best to the right sidebar. A double-click is the alternative method of selecting those images. To give an example. A user searching for the game Diablo might enter Diablo in the search form. The resulting pictures will show images of Diablo 1, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. It is then possible to only select Diablo 3 images from the first batch to tell the search that these are the images to find and display from then on.

Pixolu will then search for and display images that are closely related to the selected images of step 2. The url, resolution and source of selected images will be shown. The only way to view images in full resolution is to load them by clicking on the source url in the sidebar.

He can then change the wallpaper immediately by pressing the corresponding button. This button will open a smaller preview window that is displaying a thumbnail image of a random image that got pulled from Flickr. The image was tagged with at least one tag that have been set in the application itself.

A click on the Change button loads another image. This can be repeated until a suitable image has been found. There is no immediate acceptance button. The user has to wait until the countdown reaches zero which will automatically have the effect that the full image will be downloaded from Flickr and set as the system’s wallpaper.

A click on Install / Save Changes will add the application to the system startup process. This will have the effect that Fleace will be autostarted and display its window so that the user can pick a new wallpaper. If he sets the countdown timer to 0 the whole process of selecting and setting a new wallpaper from Flickr will be invisible to the user. The application will terminate after changing the wallpaper on the computer system.

Fleace is compatible with all Windows operating systems beginning with Windows 95 including Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Surprisingly enough the browser plugin works not only in Internet Explorer but also in Firefox. I have not checked out if it is running in Opera as well but it could very well be. Photosynth combines sets of photos that depict an object to create a bigger picture with depth and the ability to explore.

That technique adds more detail to the pictures. Imagine a static picture. It can only display certain dimensions and fails to display everything in the same detail. Photosynth steps in and creates a new “explorable” image.

The Photosynth website has some great examples on their website, are you ready to explore the Sphinx, Taj Mahal, Eton College or a Night Skyline in greater detail than you ever did before?

The Photosynth software to create new Synths requires a Windows Live ID which is bit of a turn off. Creation loads the Photosynth page in Internet Explorer to create an account on the website

Users should also note that all synths will be uploaded to Photosynth and that all of them are made public for now. They also only work on computers running Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Once that is done a basic photo manager opens on the system that shows photo previews and lets the user select photos to synth. There are no options to chose other than picking the right photos that are somehow connected and pressing the Synth button.

The photos get processed and uploaded immediately. There is no way to stop the process once it is underway. Synth can be deleted on the website however. Here is the link to the synth that I have created. I only used a few photos because I could not find any more connected in my photo folder.

It’s definitely a nice technique but there should be an option to create private synths and another option to view the offline.

The author Axel was so nice to send me registration keys for his software program that can be used to turn the free version into the professional version. The professional version supports additional file types which was my only criticism in the previous review.

If you want to grab a registration key for Fast Picture Viewer reply in here with a comment and I send them to anyone who is commenting as long as I have some. The keys are good for one machine only and require activation over the Internet.

That’s a great chance of getting the fastest image viewer out there for free. What are you waiting for?

Update: Keys are out! I send out lots of them and hope everyone who received one has a good experience and writes about it here or directly to the author.

There was virtually no delay when viewing those images which I have always experienced before. Each image viewer that I tried had a small delay when displaying those large 4 Megabyte+ images.

Startup is very quick as well. Fast Picture Viewer comes with a slick design and runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and most likely Windows Server 2008 as well.

While designed with speed in mind Fast Picture Viewer has several additional interesting features that make it stick out of the crowd of image viewers. The basics first. Users can integrate the software program in the shell, make it the default image viewer for file types and load files directly from within the interface.

The mouse wheel scrolls the images of the directory forward or backward and a click zooms into the image. Several keyboard shortcuts are available for mouse-less navigation. It has a Keep / Copy Folder function that provides a great method of copying selected images to that folder with just the keyboard.

The software program supports both Adobe XMP and Windows Vista metadata creation and update which fuels a rating feature where users can rate images on the fly.

The only thing that might keep someone from using Fast Picture Viewer is its lack of support of image formats. The free for personal use edition supports the JPEG format (*.jpeg, *.jpg, *.jpe, *.jfif, *.exif) and Microsoft HD Photo (*.hdp, *.wdp) / JPEG-XR while the professional version adds support for other common file types like png, tiff, bmp and RAW format previewing and is sold for $29.99 which is a reasonable price for such a fast software.

Another point of criticism could be that it concentrates solely on image viewing and that it does not offer image organizing or editing features. I do not need and miss those features on the other hand but some users might.

A new gallery is created by simply pointing the software to a folder on the hard drive that contains at least one image. All images are then displayed in a thumbnail preview mode that offers the user basic image editing functions and the option to select a different size for the output image.

A right-click on a thumbnail rotates the image by 90 degrees while a left-click opens a larger image preview window. The size of the image can be left unchanged or selected from a resolution between 640×480 and 1280×1024.

Once all the changes have been made the gallery can be exported into different “gallery formats” including one that is only exporting the pictures themselves. Other formats include HTML pages, Coppermine, Singapore and standard & modified SPGM.

Several of the galleries require some additional scripts to run properly, for example php or even MySQL scripts. The help file explains that in great detail with links to the program packages.

If so, meet an interesting start-up called ScrnShots. Besides having a fancy 2.0 name it provides you with a few effective tools for keeping the screenshots you take in order and for ease of linking to them and embedding them into a web page. One of such tools would definitely be tagging that can be applied on each image to make it easier for you to find your way to it later on. The function allowing the user to view existing screenshots in an orderly manner through the web interface surely comes in handy too but the thing I find most useful about this service is that it prepares a few links to various sizes of the picture for you to simply copy&paste these into your site to have the pictures embedded as links which take you to the host upon clicking them. Here, viewers can leave comments on your screenshots and view them in full size. One last thing especially addicted screenshotters could appreciate is getting a personal RSS feed updating anyone who should be interested in new shots you take and a partly customizable widget made up of 1 up to 10 thumbnails of your latest “artwork”.

ScrnShots preview:

All this would be kind of clumsy if you had to use ScrnShots’ online uploader every time you want to share a screenshot. Fortunately there’s a very lightweight (5 files) desktop version of the uploader available for download from here that makes it possible to snap certain area on your screen and tag/describe the image before uploading it. There are versions for both Windows and Mac, however, I got an error message when trying to run it on my system. Hopefully that only happened on account of the application being a 0.7Beta and the new version to come will be working properly. If you do give it a try, please let me know whether the desktop uploader worked for you or not.

The images are then shown as thumbnails in the left pane of the application and the user can tweak a few settings before he hits the start button. It’s possible to rotate the images, select an output folder and chose if the images should be reduced by percentage or constant values. It is also possible to change the output format to another image format.

The functions described above are supported by most, if not all, image resizers on earth. The additional features that might make Imgares interesting to some users are the following:

• Add Background – Adds a background color to the image and increases the size of the image by a defined margin.
• Add Text – Text can be added to the images.Colors, Fonts and alignment can be selected.
• Change Colors – Change Light, Contrast and Red, Green & Blue values of the images.
• Create Slideshow – Creates a movie (avi) slideshow from the images with transition effects.

Imgares is definitely not the usual image resizer. Especially the movie slideshow feature is something that is not that common.

The functionality is more or less the same and can be broken down to finding duplicate images and giving the user options to react in certain ways, e.g. deleting, renaming, removing the duplicate images.

VisiPics is one of those applications that can detect duplicate images. It was developed to be capable of working with large image archives, the developers have tested it with an archive of 100.000 images that had a combined size of 15 Gigabytes. It offers dual core support, an efficient algorithm and smart automatic choices on numerous occasions.

A slider determines how strictly the program should determine similarities between images offering a scale from loose to strict. The results are displayed during the scan which means that the user can start to manage them while the scan is still going on.

The thumbnails of the detected duplicate images are displayed in the left pane. Hovering the mouse over an image displays the most relevant information including file size and resolution to the user making it easy to determine if the files are similar. It also displays a bigger picture of the image in the lower central pane. A left-click marks a file. Once all files have been marked they can either be deleted or moved by choosing the appropriate action in the Actions menu.

A user has the choice to let the program determine the image that will be deleted and the image that will be kept. That’s probably the best way of dealing with large image archives. It would simply take a very long time to check each image manually to determine if they are indeed similar and proceed with an appropriate action.

The website is offering many details on the process, how the program is comparing images in a Wiki-like interface. The most commonly used image formats are supported by VisiPics including jpg, gif, bmp and png.

Looking for an easy way to remove a background from one of your digital photos? Commercial photo editing programs like Photoshop have the tools necessary to erase complicated backgrounds from digital photos, but unless you are a professional, you probably don’t have this installed on your computer.

Luckily, there’s a way to remove backgrounds without needing Photoshop and actually without needing any software! There are many online photo editing services that you can use, one of which is FotoFlexer, a free online photo editor with many advanced features.

It is by the far the most advanced online editor in terms of the GUI interface, which is super fast, and in terms of the number of tools available, including morphing, recoloring, layering, effects, animations, and lots more.

To remove a background from an image, first upload a picture to FotoFlexer. You do not have to create an account if you already have photos on your computer. You can also grab pictures directly from Picasa, flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and Photobuck, but you’ll have to create a free account.

Now click on the Geek tab at the right and you’ll see a couple of buttons like Smart Cutout and Smart Scissors. The Smart Scissors tool is what we want to use here. It’s very similar to the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop.

Now you will want to begin drawing a boundary around the part of the image you want to cut out from the background. Click at the starting point and then continue clicking in small increments along the outer edges of the object. You’ll notice that on each click, the Smart Scissors will automatically snap the curved lines around the the object like shown below:

Continue clicking around the object until you get to the end. Then you’ll need to join the last dot with your first dot in order to create a closed selection. Only then will you see that the option “Create Cutout” become available. When you hover over the first dot you had created, you’ll see it turns green, click on it and the background will darken.

Your final image would look like something below. You’ll have to play around with the scissors tools, but basically if you want a better cut, you’ll have to create more points at smaller distances.

You can use this free service to remove a person from a large group or to merge two photographs together, i.e. take one part of one picture and join it with a different part of a second picture. Enjoy!

The developers of the image recovery software have created a list of supported camera models which is probably a good point to start. The list also contains those models that were found to be not working with the software, so before you try check the list. You need to connect the camera to the computer or put the memory card that contained the pictures in a card reader that is connected to the computer running the image recovery software.

It’s then just the matter of selecting the correct camera model or media from the list of available ones. The software will then automatically scan the card and try to recover all information it can find. All images that are recovered will be stored on the hard drive in a location that you specify.

One tool that automates part of the process is AmoK Exif Sorter which was mentioned in the excellent Shell Extension City blog. You can add files and folders to the software and use part of the Exif data to rename the photo. The default output will use the data and time when the photo was taken as the filename.

This can be changed, various variables from the Exif information can be added and removed to create unique filenames. It is furthermore possible to add custom text as well. I usually rename on a folder by folder basis and add the country and town to the filename as well as the date and remove the time instead.

The Exif Sorter takes care of the folder structure as well, the default format is Year/Month/Day which can be customized as well. The filenames can be further customized in the options by selecting the separator and digit format for instance. Subfolders are processed by default which can be turned off.

The default language of the program is German which can be changed to English by clicking on Datei > Optionen. Just click on the pulldown menu named Sprache and select Englisch from the menu. All menu entries will be in English after the next restart.

AmoK Exif Sorter provides an excellent semi-automatic way of renaming image collections.

What might seem like a fun place at first, actually has very broad research potential. You found an old baseball card lying around, and it may be worth hundreds of bucks. Just snap a shot and ask if anyone knows. If you find something you like on the web, add the pic, and ask where you can buy it.

Since it is community based you have a much higher chance of a good answer, than asking your friends, or posting a question on a forum. I also like the fact that you can randomly go through photos, answering some you like, and joining the discussion of unanswered ones.

This is an online service that looks like fun to participate in, but there are some tools that could make it better. For example, it would be nice to be able to get RSS feeds of either all questions, or just separate categories.

There is a drawback to the service, which is mainly the fact that it’s new and that it’s community based. This means that there aren’t too many users, so don’t expect a flood of comments, but you still may get some useful tips. Notice that the answer to the question in the pic was posted on the same day as the question itself.

As the service grows there will be more and more people, but that also means more and more spam and more and more idiots ruining the fun. Weather the service will be able to fight this is questionable, we’ll have to wait and see.

While this might appeal to users who create and upload dozens of photos to Flickr daily it does not make that much sense for the user who occasionally uploads some. Still, I suspect that some users might find this application useful. It is possible to upload images to a certain set or create new sets if you place the photos in subfolders.

It is of course inevitable to set your Flickr username and password in the application so that the photos can be uploaded automatically. If you want to start the application with Windows you need to move its shortcut in the Startup folder in the start menu.