Photops Blog

Google’s image search is one of the fastest ways to find a picture of just about anything, but that doesn’t mean you can use all of the images you find on your website or blog. We’ve shied away from finding images for Download Squad on Google Image Search in the past, because it’s hard to find and credit the creator of the image and be sure you have permission to use it. Google just made it a lot easier, though, by adding the option to search for Creative Commons-licensed images.

The terms of Creative Common licenses vary, but if you go to “advanced image search,” you can choose to filter images by the reuse and modification privileges their licenses allow. If you search for Creative Commons images, Google will also throw in other images that are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation license or in the public domain. Google says it’s still a user’s responsibility to click through and verify that the licensing information is actually correct, but that’s still a lot easier than sifting through thousands of image results yourself, looking for one you can use.

If you’re expecting online image editors to be anemic, you’ll be surprised by the extensive features of many of the nominees like Sumo Paint. Sporting a toolbar, image navigator, swatches, and layers, Sumo Paint does more than just crop and rotate images. In addition to having layers, as some other editors do, Sumo Paint has support for blending modes and other advanced layering magic like drop shadow and outer glow. The brushes and ink tools offer a wide variety of shapes and textures. If you like some of the paint-centric features of Sumo Paint, you’ll definitely want to check out the Gravity tool, which creates some pretty interesting abstract paint effects. Sumo Paint also supports drag and drop image opening for pictures you have stored in your Sumo Paint account. Sumo Paint doesn’t require a login for use, but if you sign up for a free account you can store images online and participate in the Sumo Paint community by submitting your work and ranking the work of others.

Visit: www.sumopaint.com

Weblog Google Operating System points out a new search option in Google Image Search that filters images by color. Color search isn’t available as an operator yet, but a simple URL hack will do the trick.

To start searching Google by image color, all you have to do is append &imgcolor=colorname to the URL of a Google Image Search—where colorname is replaced by one of a number of colors of your choice. So, for example, your search URLs might look like this:

http://images.google.com/images?q=cat&hl=en&imgcolor=green

This isn’t the first time a search engine has added support for searching by color, of course. Previously mentioned apps like Colr Pickr, Multicolr, and Yotophoto all aim to do the same, but they’re each more specialized, covering only Flickr pics (the first two) and stock photos (the last). It’s nice to have this functionality built into Google.

Decrease your bandwidth usage and save yourself some editing time with Smush.it, a web-based image optimization service.

Although designed with web site optimization in mind, Smush.it doesn’t discriminate. Dump a bunch of images in, and smush.it shaves them down. The service strips metadata and recompresses the images to decrease the file size, while its compression algorithm does an excellent job preserving image quality with little to no visible artifacts.

Smush.it supports bulk upload, and can also pull images directly from a site. It also has plug-ins for both Firefox and the Wordpress blogging platform. If disk size isn’t so much an issue as the dimensions of the image, check out two great programs we’ve reviewed for some quick and dirty cropping: InfranView and, my personal favorite bulk cropping tool, JPegCrops. The web-based service and extensions are free, no sign-up or registration required.

Visit: Smush.it

Phoenix is the Photoshop-like web based image editor of the Aviary application suite. Phoenix has quite a few advanced image editing techniques considering that it is a web based app. The layers, blending modes, alpha channels, layer styles, levels, hue & saturation and masking allow you to do some very effective image editing techniques.

If you head on over to the creations page and you see an image you like and wonder how it was created using Phoenix then you can click on ‘Open in Phoenix’ and you will be able to see what is on each layer.

Visit: Phoenix