Picnik : Free Online Photo Editor

Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart's content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames. It's fast, easy, and fun.

All tools are free, including auto- fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color adjustments, basic sharpening, and red-eye fixing. Move over to the Create tab and you'll see that all Effects (most of which have the ability to be painted into just the areas of your image where you want them), an awesome Text tool with dozens of fonts, dozens of shapes, including seasonal shapes for holidays and events, and some super customizable frames.

It also have great Facebook-only features: show your photos on your profile page, browse and edit all photos tagged with you in them, or even browse and edit your friends' photos too!

Picnik Premium is available for $24.95 USD a year and gets you access to way, way more cool stuff. You'll get a completely ad-free experience, all the effects, dozens of shapes and fonts, plus previews of new features, premium support, and advanced editing tools like Curves and Levels!

You also get unlimited access to all your favorite photo websites right from inside Picnik, including Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Webshots, which gives you the ability to transfer photos to and from those different sites, to and from Facebook!

swfIR - SWF Image Replacement with style

The swfIR has put together a handy widget for styling images in your site. The library utilitizes JavaScript and Flash to produce a variety of image effects like shadows, rounded corners (with or without borders), rotation, and borders.

swfIR (swf Image Replacement) is here to solve some of the design limitations of the standard HTML image and its widely-accepted associated CSS values, while still supporting standards-based design concepts. Using the dark arts of JavaScript and Flash, swfIR gives you the ability to apply an assortment of visual effects to any or all images on your website. Through progressive enhancement, it looks through your page and can easily add some new flavor to standard image styling.

When you start to use swfIR, you’ll need the ability to style it, the same way that you can do with regular images. To get around browser inconsistencies, swfIR adds a with a class of swfir around any image you’re replacing.

There are some issues with swfIR that the creators make us aware of, and they are:

• Resizing/zooming in Opera crashes the browser
• Flash of unstyled content: images load first before JavaScript replaces them
• alt text is not preserved upon replacement
• HTML right-click options are disabled
• Incompatible with other JS libraries like Prototype or MooTools
• Doesn’t work with hot-linked images because of security restrictions in Flash

Massive World War II collection debuts online

An online collection of World War II documents, billed as the world's largest, debuted last week. Footnote.com, which archives historical documents on the Web, developed the collection with the National Archives and Records Administration.

The collection starts with 9 million "hero pages" profiling individual U.S. veterans of World War II with data taken from Army enlistment records. Veterans and their families and friends can add further information and photos.

The project also includes an online reproduction of the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, which is inscribed with the names of more than 1,100 crewmen who died when the battleship was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941. Visitors to the Web site can search for the names of the victims.

Other highlights of the collection include the personnel rolls of Pearl Harbor, reports of missing air crews, submarine patrol reports and naval press clippings. Also included are extensive analyses of the Allied bombing strategy against Japan, including target photographs.

Footnote.com Chief Executive and President Russ Wilding says the collection will mark the debut of 50,000 photos exclusive to the site.

"Our hope is to engage people to share their stories about relatives and friends who served in World War II," he says. "Many of the veterans have passed away, and the number of living World War II veterans continues to shrink. We're trying to facilitate the capturing of stories before they're lost forever."