18Apr2007

Online Image Editors Compared

Update: I added three new image editors to the list — Online Photo Tool, Fauxto and Picnik. All of them are good; I am certainly impressed by the quality of the tools that are now available online.

Of the three, I would definitely recommend checking out Picnik, if only to appreciate the elegance of its interface.

A not uncommon request my web team receives is to do some sort of simple image editing for a staff member. I also sometimes hear that someone is getting Photoshop installed so that they can edit images and add them to their intranet site themselves.

This is crazy when you consider how much Photoshop costs and the learning curve to use it properly.

In this new era of web-based applications I thought it would be worthwhile to see if there were any online image editing tools that would meet these requirements and maybe more.

The Candidates

'Comparison Table of Online Image Editors

I looked at the following online image editors:

One service I didn't include was Preloadr because it only works with Flickr and uses the nexImage technology anyway.

Features Compared

View the comparison of features table.

As well as showing which tool did what, I tried to indicate — where it was useful — which tools were especially full-featured when it came to certain activities, such as applying a wide range of effects or being able to save an image to multiple formats.

Thoughts and Takeaways

Overall, I was very impressed with what's available when it comes to editing images online. By and large the tools were easy to use and had an impressive array of features.

The majority of the tools had solid basic image editing functionality — crop, resize, adjust color, brightness and so on. Some had unlimited levels of undo and redo, which was especially handy.

Some of the features available were up there with full-blown graphics tools. For example, Cellsea included the unsharp mask function for accurately adjusting sharpness.

Two of the image editors (NetImager and nexImage) allowed you to use layers to apply your changes and effects in a non-destructive way, which was a nice feature.

The tools were integrated to varying degress with online image storage services like Flickr and Photobucket. Some also enabled you to view all the images from a web page and then choose which one you wanted to edit, although apart from Cellsea, this was done via a bookmarklet.

The tools had varying capabilities when it came to uploading and saving images from/to different formats. However, between them all you could probably upload and save an image in most of the main file formats (e.g., JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, PDF, EPS).

My Choice

I was particularly impressed with Cellsea and will likely settle on it as the tool I recommend to others. It has a clean, responsive interface with an impressive set of features and can handle a wide range of file formats.

Posted on: April 18, 2007 | 27 Comments

27 Comments Posted

great comparison. I had most of them in my del.icio.us Now I have an idea which one to use in particular siuations.

1. Posted by Markus on July 28, 2006

Wow, thanks for this list. I tend to have the same problem and hear the same photoshop line over and over.
Actually I still resized for flickr-accounts of friends untill Flock hit the internet. Now I know what to tell them to do : read your blog :)

2. Posted by franky on July 29, 2006

Does any one know if there is any open source version of anything that does something similar?

3. Posted by Ran on July 31, 2006

Ran – are you looking for something that is web-based; i.e., you install it on a server rather than on your local machine?

4. Posted by Christian Watson on July 31, 2006

Yes, could be a javascript-php type of solution, flash-php or anything combination. I have full server access so its not a problem installing anything, I'm just wondering if anyone built something of the sort, which is also shared...

5. Posted by Ran on July 31, 2006

FYI, Cellsea started from an unauthorized copy of Snipshot's JavaScript.

They've munged the source a bit since we contact them, but you can still see where it came from.

6. Posted by Beau Hartshorne on July 31, 2006

Great job comparing these mate!

7. Posted by Ivan Minic on July 31, 2006

Does any one know if there is any attempt for something similar with the scriptacolus/prototype pair as a front?

8. Posted by Ran on July 31, 2006

Beau – I'm surprised you would leave it at that if they are, as you allege, using your code. I recognize the time and effort it would take to pursue such a case, but isn't it worth trying to protect your intellectual property?

Ran – re. your earlier question, I don't know if ImageMagick might be what you are looking for. Re. your last question, sorry, no idea.

9. Posted by Christian Watson on August 01, 2006

Another great tool is On-line Photo Tools. It includes an awesome red eye removal tool which only one other tool listed includes.

10. Posted by Neil on August 01, 2006

Christian, I can't comment on any action we may take. That said, we need to weigh the cost of any action (even in terms of our time) against the threat. For now, our time is better spent elsewhere.

11. Posted by Beau Hartshorne on August 01, 2006

Hi Christian,
You've done a very thorough job.
Have a look at the PXN8 toolbar. It has flip/mirror features not available in the default theme you see on the website.

Walter

12. Posted by Walter Higgins on August 02, 2006

Walter – that looks very nice! Are those features going to be added to the main editor?

Also, I like your Memphis theme ;-)

13. Posted by Christian Watson on August 03, 2006

OMG.. The table is so exhaustive! You must have spent a lot of time compiling it! Thanks for sharing :)

14. Posted by pelf on April 18, 2007

Anz special reason for rating picnc's "open from online" higher than phixr's? The latter definitely supports more sites... and the handling isn't worse either.

Phixr also supports "edit canvas", btw.

15. Posted by Thomas on April 19, 2007

You posted this like 6 months too late Christian :), my mum has been hassling me about how to edit her photos on the computer and so she ended up going to a Photoshop class.

Good post though as I am sure it will come up again.

16. Posted by Jermayn Parker on April 19, 2007

Thomas — thanks for the feedback. I have updated the chart to reflect these corrections.

Jermayn — talk about overkill! Have you shown her Picasa? That's a great free desktop tool for managing and editing photos really easily. We love it.

17. Posted by Christian Watson on April 20, 2007

Hi Christian,
Great story!

I would like to tell you about improveimages.com web-site. I think this site might be usefull for busy person, who wants good quality to photo gallery.

I have developed http://www.improveimages.com/
web-site which makes color / contrast corection extremely easy for digital photos. It helps specially with very badly toned images, eg. wrong color temperature.

It tunes color non-lineary (like curves in photoshop).
Site is currently at alpha stage :)

Petri

18. Posted by Petri Piirainen on April 21, 2007

ImageCrop (http://www.imagecrop.com) is a lovely little free web-based editor, very clean and quick to use for resizing and cropping.

19. Posted by Rillaith on April 25, 2007

You should also check out and review http://www.wiredness.com

20. Posted by Simon on May 07, 2007

i never concidered online image editors but will take a look i alway use fireworks.as they say stick to what you know

21. Posted by the website designer on June 04, 2007

How about comparing Fotoflexer as well? It's quite capable: besides the usual image manipulations, it can import PNG, can draw over the image (no shapes though).

Would also be great to hyperlink the name of the tool in the comparison table to point to the URL; and to delete the spam comment 21 here.

22. Posted by Dan Dascalescu on September 07, 2007

Yes, Cellsea is the winner here. Simple and FREE editor. Thanks a lot!!!

23. Posted by Roman on September 25, 2007

about a year ago i used an online image editor that was very fun and I can't remember what website it was on. It allowed you to upload a picture of yourself or a friend and provided you with hats, sunglasses, mustaches, beards, earrings, noserings, necklaces, tatoos, scars, etc. all of which could be resized and rotated prior to applying to your photo. It was loads of fun - anyone here know where that site is?

24. Posted by Ken on October 20, 2007

I found it - http://www.pikipimp.com/

25. Posted by Ken on October 20, 2007

Simple image editor is http://www.photoeditor.cz

26. Posted by Peter on October 21, 2007

Hi Christian,
Thanks for doing a great job comparing these tools. I used most of your post on my blog.

All the best,
Carel.

27. Posted by Carel on December 04, 2007