If you have a whole bunch of photos to share, it may be easier or even more fun to pull them altogether into a neat little collage.  Here are 3 online tools which work directly from your browser, all free – which will help you do just that.

1. How to make collages with the photos on your PC

Photovisi is a free online service which allows you to pick one of many collage template and then launches an in-browser interface where you can quickly add pictures. 

My favorite part about this service is that it you don’t need to upload entire photos (which can take very long if your photos are high-res) in order to make it work.  It is intelligent enough to create and use thumbnails from your pictures on-the-fly so that adding pictures from your computer is incredibly speedy.  No installation or registration needed.

2. How to make collages with photos already online

Shape Collage takes photos found on any webpage and instantly turns it into a collage.  The beauty of this is that it you don’t need to point it to Flickr or particular photo site for it to work.  Just point it to ANY site, and it will crawl the page and make use of the pictures.  Plus, you get to make all kinds of interesting shapes for collages.

There’s also a free desktop edition which allows you to play with your pictures offline.

3. How to edit photos and make simple collages online

Picture2Life is a free service which allows you to make simple edits to your photos before you collage them.  Available on multiple platforms, it has a facebook as well as a made for iPhone interface, and a Firefox extension so you can collage from wherever you feel most comfortable.

Do you create photo collages online?  Tell us about it in the comments

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When it comes to organizing pictures, I only ever use Google’s Picasa photo organizer. 

Now, one of my favorite features from Picasa is something called ‘I’m feeling lucky’ where it enhances dark and bright colors in a photo and adjusts both color and contrast to optimal levels in one click.  No fiddling around – just instant editing. 

ImproveYourImages.com is a great piece of free web technology which allows you to get access that feature without having to install anything.

You just upload your image…

• …and it automatically adjusts the color saturation, temperature and lighting of your photo
• …and lines it up side by side with the original for a quick comparison.
• …where you can download your new and improved picture on the spot!

Perfect for quick edits – where you don’t have or want to fire up Picasa to make simple tweaks.

What other images tools do you use?  Let us know in the comments!

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1. Web-based Intelligent Resizing

The most common ways of image resizing – cropping and basic shrinking/enlarging usually ends up with compromised results – in the form of pictures which are either distorted or eliminate detail. 

rsizr is a web-tool which scans the picture for ‘important’ sections and allows you to manipulate the size of the image by just resizing the picture’s ‘unimportant’ sections. 

See the video below to get a better idea of this awesome technology.  The results are simply amazing. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. GIMP Plugin which is aware of your content

If you liked the rsizr technolgy described above and want a desktop version of it…  Try out the Liquid Rescale plugin for GIMP (The open source version of Photoshop).  This will allow you to take the editing offline and is perfect for heavier users.

3. Resize Multiple Images With a Right-Click

Microsoft calls them Power Toys – I call them features which should have been integrated into Windows XP by default. 

Image Resizer is a free piece of software from Microsoft, which helps you resize one or more files from a right click menu directly in Windows Explorer.  This Power Toy only works on XP, and not Vista.

4. The fastest way to create thumbnails

Quick Thumbnail is an online image resizer which bills itself as the fastest way to resize images online.  What I really liked about this service was that you could:

• Either specify a picture or URL
• Resize it to common sizes based on different usage (icon, avatar, banner, full monitor resolution etc.)
• Simultaneously create multiple resized images on the spot (useful when testing various sizes).

5. Change normal images into vector format

One of the biggest advantages vector images have over other file types is the fact that they do NOT distort when resized.  Here’s a good example of what happens when you zoom into a vector image.

Stanford University has recently released a free tool that will actually convert typical images into vector format!  Works best with items without too many gradient colors like photos for example (Still looks great though – but the converted image doesn’t look ‘photo-like’).

Perfect for logos, scanned signatures, or anything which needs to be different sizes at different times.

How do you resize your images?  Let us know in the comments!

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