The Quest for the Perfect Online Image Editor

Thursday, February 1st 2007 | Ismael Ghalimi

Over the past few months, a flury of online image editing tools have been released, including Phixr, Picnik, Pixer, and Snipshot. They all make it easy to remove red eyes on a picture, or apply a sepia filter to it, but they fall short when being used for web development.

When developing a website, you often need to crop pictures to the pixel, and resize them to a specific size that will neatly fit into your page design. I find myself having such a need for adding the logos of partners on the Intalio website for example. Problem is, most applications I have tried do not have zooming capabilities, making precise cropping virtually impossible. And as far as resizing goes, it’s usually down through handles displayed around the picture, as opposed to direct entry of the desired size, making the exercise quite tricky.

One solution I found for dealing with the sizing issue is to upload my pictures onto Flickr, and click on the “different sizes” link, which gives you five available sizes, Square, Thumbnail, Small, Medium, Large. If you’re lucky, one will match the one you need. That being said, I hate having to rely on luck when trying to get productive with Office 2.0 applications, therefore I hope that the good folks at Phixr, Picnik, Pixer, or Snipshot will read this and make the necessary improvements to their otherwise pretty cool applications. In the meantime, I have added a new entry into the Office 2.0 Bug Tracker.

Entry filed under: Office 2.0

13 Comments - Add a comment

1. Jan | February 2nd, 2007 at 5:52 pm

You could try Fauxto. It kinda sucks because you can’t zoom, but everything else you’re talking about is there.

2. Beau Hartshorne | February 2nd, 2007 at 7:40 pm

Hi, this is Beau from Snipshot.

You can resize and crop with direct pixel inputs in our “adjust” palette. We don’t have a zoom feature yet, but if you’re using Mac OS X, you can use the OS zoom feature to get down to the pixel level in Snipshot. To use it go to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Mouse, then check “Zoom using scroll wheel while holding”, and make sure to turn Smoothing off in Options.

3. Darrin Massena | February 3rd, 2007 at 12:03 am

Today’s update to Picnik adds pixel-precise resizing to the zooming and pixel-precise cropping it already has. You can resolve the “Image editors do not offer precise cropping and resizing” bug as fixed!

4. Thomas | February 3rd, 2007 at 7:13 am

Hi, this is Thomas from Phixr.com.

Phixr has had resize-by-the-pixel and crop-by-the-pixel from the beginning. Please don’t get me wrong, but I just don’t get your point.

5. Ismael Ghalimi | February 4th, 2007 at 9:09 am

Jan,

Thanks for the tip!

Best regards
-Ismael

6. Ismael Ghalimi | February 4th, 2007 at 9:17 am

Beau,

Nice trick!

Best regards
-Ismael

7. Ismael Ghalimi | February 4th, 2007 at 9:18 am

Darrin,

Thanks! That was fast. I updated the Office 2.0 Bug Tracker.

Congratulations!
-Ismael

8. Ismael Ghalimi | February 4th, 2007 at 9:18 am

Thomas,

I cannot get the zoom feature to work. Is it implemented yet?

Best regards
-Ismael

9. Thomas | February 6th, 2007 at 5:39 am

I was talking about the resize/crop feature. The zoom button is active only if the photo is beyond a minimum size (which I don’t recall exactly at the moment).

10. Ismael Ghalimi | February 6th, 2007 at 11:33 am

Thomas,

Thanks for the clarification!

Best regards
-Ismael

11. Peter Quintus | February 8th, 2007 at 12:11 am

Ismael,

You might want to check out our Online Image Editor. It’s not a web-based service like the ones you mention, but it has all the features you need, and many more.

12. Sami | April 10th, 2007 at 5:29 am