Web based image editors have been popping up for some time now. Even the de facto image editor Photoshop couldn't resist setting up shop. But sometimes you just want to simply resize or crop a photo and not be inadated with a multitude of tools and swatches. Enter picjuice, an online image editor with simplicity in mind.

As soon as you pull up the site it's clear that "ease of use" was the main objective here. The only tools available are Crop, Resize, Flip, Rotate and Adjust.

The controls for each tools are simple as well, depending on the tool selected you either get an A or B option, a slider or in the case of the Crop tool, a cross hair to select the area you want to use. These simple controls will aid in a shorter learning curve over the more feature rich sites.

In our testing we actually found the resizing tool here better than the one available from Photoshop Express. In Express, the resized image looked jagged but not in picjuice . However, the site seemed to be only compatible with JPG or PNG files as when we tried a GIF file picjuice would hang when we tried to edit the image.

Currently in beta, picjuice joins the already crowded online imaging arena. Hopefully, its limited get down to business attitude will help to differentiate itself from the competition.

Sites like Flickr and Photobucket already have services that let you build slide shows, MagToo takes it a step further by also letting you create great panoramic shots to share with others.

Creating a panoramic image does require some thought before you start uploading. In order to get a quality panoramic image, MagToo recommends that your photos overlap by at least 20-50% and that you try to keep the camera level as possible. Once you've uploaded the photos, it's just a matter of clicking the "Stitch Photos" button and letting MagToo do the rest.

The main issue we had with the service is that Internet Explorer is required for the creation of the image. Hopefully in the future, the developers will add content creation support for other major browsers as well.

While Moodstream may be geared towards the folks in the creative department to help them design the next big thing, there's nothing wrong with using it as a screen saver. That is if you like a screen saver that doesn't actually save your screen and displays random pictures with music based on your current mood.

In order to get your mood on, you'll need to adjust a few sliders. Moods range from happy to sad, calm to lively, humorous to serious and so on. If that's more control than you would like, preset moods are also available.

Moodstream pulls in photos from Getty Images' vast database along with music from Pump Audio's Soundtrack. If you like the current mood you can save it to your moodboard (registration required) so you can come back to it later. You also have the option of purchasing any of the images or music on the spot.

So even if you're not the creative type but enjoy having random pictures and music playing give Moodstream a try.

DeskLickr sounds like that kid we knew in first grade who would take any dare, but it's actually a neat little app with an unfortunately silly name. DeskLickr grabs desktop pictures from Flickr, making sure your wallpaper is never stale. It can change your desktop manually or automatically, and give you a little "about this photo" info, so you know whose picture it is and where to find it on Flickr.

There are plenty of options to make sure you get only the pictures you want. You can tell DeskLickr to grab from all of Flickr, from a group of your choice, just from Flickr's "interesting" selection, or from your own photos or favorites. If you don't like a picture, you can tell DeskLickr not to show it again.

Regular Download Squad readers will note that app is similar in function and effect to another one we recently reviewed, Desktoptopia. To compare: Desktoptopia uses its own image feeds, which are consistently full of great desktops, while DeskLickr offers a broader range with a little more hit-and-miss involved. Also: Desktoptopia is available for both Mac and PC, so if you're running Windows, you may want to scope out our earlier post.

So in our last post about the P2P media sharing site CloudFire, y'all jumped in and answered our question about BitTorrent's Bram Cohen.

This time around, there are no questions to answer. It's first come, first serve.

We have 100 invites to the first lucky folks who use "downloadsquad" without quotes naturally to sign up here.

We've had a bit of a play with CloudFire and the things that jump right out to us is that it seriously is easy to share media files with people who might not be as geeky as a lot of us are. And you know what, us geeky people like easy things too, that's why a lot of us use Macs.

There are some random issues as expected, and you have to make sure that the person connecting to your media has the most updated version of Flash, but other than that it works nicely. A good amount of bandwidth on your end doesn't hurt either.

They're completely open to your feedback and have been asking us what we think.

It's still very pre-beta and stealthy so here's your chance to join in!

UPDATE: If the code doesn't work then you might not have gotten in on the 100 invites. If we get more, we'll pass along the word!

A lot of digital cameras are great for taking photos, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it's alright to have them listed by date and time -- at least that keeps them in order -- but we think it's a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they're actually of. That's where NameChanger comes in. It's a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.

NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to pictures. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and "DCP_16739" becomes "Hawaii01," or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have pictures that take up more disk space than this useful little app.

Ever wish you could scan your entire photo directory to find and delete duplicate images? Sure, one or two pictures here and there might not take up that much space. But when you realize that you've accidentally stored your entire wedding album in three different folders, that's a whole different story. Of course, you don't want to start deleting images until you're absolutely certain they're identical. And that's where DupliFinder comes in.

This Windows-only utility will scan any directory (and optionally its subdirectories) and look for identical images. But that's not all. It will also look for images that are compositionally similar. As you can see in the screenshot, this means you won't just find exact copies of an image, but also pictures that look a little bit like your original image. This can come in handy if you're looking for another picture of your kid or dog to send to your parents. Or you know, if you're looking for a picture of a microphone.

It takes a while to scan large directories. And the open dialog is a bit awkward. You can either browser your My Pictures folder, or you can drag and drop a directory to DupliFinder from Windows Explorer. There's no way to navigate to folders outside of your My Documents directory with the browse feature.

[via Lifehacker]

Yahoo! has added the ability to view photos in email messages as slideshows without downloading them first. Honestly, we're not entirely certain when this feature was added, but it was brought to our attention by a reader comment. When we looked into it, we found that at least five months ago, there was no photo slideshow feature. And now there is. So we're going to call it a new feature.

In order to view attached images as a slideshow, you'll need to switch to the Yahoo! Mail beta interface. This feature is not available in Yahoo! Mail classic. When you receive an email with attached images, you should see an option to show images. Once you click the button, you should see several thumbnails at the bottom of your message, and the option to view those images as a slideshow.

Thanks Sandeep!

Ah, Flickr. How we love you. We loved the idyllic pre-Yahoo! days, and held back our tears with the Yahoo! phase of growth. But even when things seem so good, we wonder what the future holds. Microsoft? AOL? An undead uprising?

Now couple our fears with our stupidity. All those photos we uploaded over the past year or two? The ones housed safely on our hard drive? Yeah, right... the hard drive we, in our infinite wisdom, managed to reformat during a routine upgrade?

Flickr, you are our only hope. You hold our memories safe and secure on a server bank. Somewhere. And it's not that we don't trust you. It's Microsoft, AOL, and zombies we have problems with. Sure, some of us could do a mass download from your servers on to our machines. But for others, there's that Microsoft thing again.

We use Linux, and but for one word, we'd be horribly out of luck.

Yesterday evening we told you about a program called Squash, which offers a simple way to batch resize images on Windows, Linux, or OS X. While we still think it's a handy little utility, a reader pointed us to another application that makes us rethink our claim that image resizing doesn't get much easier.

Picture Resizer could be one of the simplest, yet most useful image utilities we've run across in a while. It's Windows only, but it's free and powerful.

All you have to do is download the Windows-only executable file to any directory. Then drag an image over the program icon. That's it. The image will automatically be resized. By default, all images will be resized so that they are 400 pixels wide. But wait, you say, I want to make my images 200 pixels wide, or 1600 pixels wide. No problem. Just change the program name from PhotoResize400.exe to PhotoResize200.exe or PhotoResize1600.exe.

If you want to resize a group of images, just highlight them and drag them all to the icon. Picture Resizer will convert the images and spit out new images (with the pixel width appended to the image names) in the same directory.

[Thanks JDeV!]

Xoopit is a new Firefox plugin that adds dynamic image previews to Gmail. It scans your email messages or images, videos, and links to media sites like YouTube, Flickr, Shutterfly and Picasaweb. The results are displayed above your Gmail window as a series of thumbnails.

The basic concept is that your email inbox is a more useful social networking tool than Facebook, MySpace, or other services, but web-based email clients generally don't present the same kind of tools for sorting through your rich media content that you can find on the other sites.

The Xoopit plugin is currently available for Firefox 1.5 and newer, and works with Gmail only. In the future, Xoopit plans to add support for Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL Mail and other services. Xoopit is in private beta, but you can add your name to the waiting list for invitations.

Update: The first 250 Download Squad readers to sign up with the code dsquad can get in on the beta today!

Does the world really need another photo sharing website? Maybe, if that site is Photie.com. Photie's design is strikingly simple. It's easy to navigate, signup is a snap, and there are plenty of interesting photos to check out on the front page. The main attraction here, though, is the ability to upload photos of any size.

Photie doesn't have all the pro features that sites like Flickr and Smugmug offer, but there are plenty of users out there who think of those as frills. A free service with a nice, clean design and no cap on file sizes looks pretty good if you don't want to deal with stuff like social networks, mobile uploads, and signup fees. This is just uploading and tagging, like nature intended it.

The site is still in beta, so we'll keep an eye on it and see how it evolves. Frankly, we're hoping it stays with the friendly "less-complicated-than-Flickr, much-classier-than-ImageShack model". Before you start with the "not another photo site!" comments, give it a look. We think some users will find it's just what they needed.

Warning: Because Photie displays recently-uploaded photos on the front page, you might not want to click through at work. There was nothing controversial up front when we took the screenshot above, but it's best to be careful. Thanks to readers Alex and Todd for catching this.

Digital photography has become a way of life for lots and lots of web users and there is no shortage of services out there to host your digital pictures (Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, Windows Live Spaces, not to mention social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace). As more and more day-to-day computing tasks move to the cloud, the market really needs a solid, web-based editing suite. With Adobe Photoshop Express, which launched its beta today, we get just that.

We look at a lot of web software and services, but have to say that Photoshop Express one of the slickest web-based applications for photos that we have ever used. Although services in the past like Picasa or Picnik have offered some basic photo editing capabilities, what Photoshop Express is doing is in a completely different league. Like many other photo services, Photoshop Express will let you share and display your online photos; each user account is given 2 GB of space to store and share photos (this is free, additional space and extra features will be available in the future, pricing TBD) and you can embed links to the Photoshop Express hosted galleries or direct-embed individual images.

Although this particular hack, which was reportedly done by making a slight change to the URL, is now fixed, the lesson is not to assume that the privacy settings on sites like Facebook and MySpace will totally protect your photos. The good news is that Zuckerberg has said in interviews that privacy is going to be Facebook's major focus as social network data becomes more portable, and additional privacy settings were introduced last week. In spite of all that hard work, though, this incident suggests Facebook still has a lot of work to do.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

PicAnswers is a site to help you find answers to questions that are difficult to explain without some visual aids. Which, seriously, is genius. Like anything else Web 2.0, it is community based, with the community as a whole doing both the asking and the answering.

Let's say you've had a painting (or picture of a painting) you've had hang on your wall ever since you were a kid and you suddenly wanted to know who the artist was or what the story behind that painting is. Take a photo, upload it, ask your question, and wait for responses. The community is still growing, so don't expect an avalanche of comments at once, but it looks like PicAnswers is picking up momentum and people are getting their questions answered.

Even if you have no particular question of your own, checking out some of the things that other people are pondering about is fun. It's almost like show and tell - except that it's more like show and ask. Sate your curiosity, ask some questions, share some knowledge, and learn a thing or two.

[via gHacks]