Serendipity35

I've come across many online image creation sites since the last time I wrote about a few, so I'm adding a few more to the mix.

There are good programs for image creation, but many of them take considerable time to master. So why use online sites? Like other cloud applications, they are completely web-based, so you can use them with any
type of computer, operating system, and browser. Even if they require registration (most don't) you can use them from different computers.

A while back Adobe launched a free web version of Photoshop. Photoshop is the main image creation software tool, but it costs, and it's a lot to learn. With the online version, the company is going after those consumers who edit, store, and
share photos online. Photoshop will still be around for professionals, but it has way more horsepower than most people need or people are willing to learn. So now there's Photoshop Express - lighter and easier to learn.

Still, Adobe is late to this game. Other companies and services like Shutterfly, Picnik, and Photobucket have been offering online editing, storage and sharing for years. But Adobe is a big, powerful player and clearly sees Photoshop Express as a marketing strategy to create interest in customers upgrading to Photoshop or the slimmed down Photoshop Elements, or to the subscription-based version of Express.

I came across a site called BigHugeLabs that allows you to make a lot of unique photo frames and edits. You can make your own ID card, press pass, name tag, Flickr badge, make a billboard of someone or something. You can make a custom blog header for your blog with your own photos. You choose or upload a photo, make some layout choices, the photo is edited online and then download your new graphic.

It's the kind of site you might use to create fun images to use for friends, but I have also used them to create images for presentations. Get creative.

I also came across an interesting mashup service from Japan that searches Amazon.com by a keyword and then returns the relevant data to you spelled out as a visual collage composed of the corresponding book covers of images pulled from the Amazon.com database.

The site is called amaztype. It's not strictly an "image creation" site, but if you create something based on a keyword, you can take a screenshot, and you have a unique image.

Try these links to get a look at some of these images being created: The Beatles, Shakespeare (in a title or as the author) or Shakespeare (just as the author) or Douglas Adams. It doesn't have to be book covers - here's one for actor/DVDs/Bogart.

Idée has a different approach to searching and viewing images. Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site, has many images available for browsing and you can search right on their site by user, tags, keywords. It's a lot tougher to search for images by a criteria like colors. Their Search Lab will find images based on up to 10 colors that you select.

TinEye is an image search engine built by Idée (currently in beta). You give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web. Take a look at this demo with Amber MacArthur.