cool non-flickr image stuff found along -- agony, aviary, photoshop express, mr. picassohead

Most of you know about flickr, the online service to host images and photos. Now that Yahoo owns it, it replaces Yahoo photos. If you used Yahoo photos (as I did) Yahoo just migrated your photos for you right on over to flickr. ;-) If you have a Yahoo account now, but never signed up for a flickr account, you now have a flickr account via your Yahoo login (I think Yahoo needs to promote that more). In addition to simple image (and now video!) hosting, there are all sorts of tools and add-ons to extend flickr. Cool enough, right?

Google came into the mix with picasa, a similar service to flickr. Picasa has a download component and one day, I will give it a try. I already have good image editing stuff (GIMP, Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, and a bunch of other stuff that came with my tablet that I never use!), plus, I kind of like Flickr, so Picasa has just never really interested me. If Picasa could somehow be EMBEDDED into blogger to make image editing easier there, well, then I would definitely use it!

Anyhow, there are lots of other choices out on the internet for image editing and hosting, besides flickr and picasa. One choice is the new Photoshop Express which now works with Flickr and Imagebucket. Photoshop Express, has some built in editing tools, galleries, and the ability to share images. My photoshop express gallery is here.

Aviary is a little different. Aviary is a collection of online tools from traditional image editing to video to music to 3d model rendering.

All of our tools are based right in your browser or as downloadable AIR applications. Our tools all communicate and relate to each other. To illustrate an example: You can import a swatch from Toucan into Phoenix, while doing complex bitmap processing of a 3D object developed in Hummingbird. Finally, you can take your finished artwork and lay it out in Owl as the DVD artwork for a music CD you and your friends put together in Roc and Myna and offer it for sale in our marketplace, Hawk.

If those are half as good as they sound, I think I might have died and gone to heaven. ;-)

Of course, considering some of the competition (gimp, photoshop, corel's suite, finalcutpro for video), I will be interested to see how it all stacks up (psst... send me an invite to hummingbird and starling...) The image editor, phoenix, looks good for a completely online editor (will it be free after beta?) -- it feels like a real piece of image editing software. It comes with the all of the standards: image sizing, auto color correction, a few basic filters, layers, the ability to draw and add text. I've only started to play with it, but the first thing I noticed (considering my raw pix are 10.2m, is that resizing doesn't tell you what the dpi or ppi is -- just dimensions.

All in all, though I'm impressed and I can't wait to give all of the other tools a whirl. If a.viary stays free, I can definitely see this being my favorite solution for image and video editing. I often move from computer to computer (work, desktop, laptop) and none of them have the same graphics software. Being able to use something like a.viary would be a life saver.

agony, is just a fun little piece of a software which creates spiragraphic images. Fireworks can do this sort of think using tweening, but wow, is this fun. Agony has a whole flickr gallery of submitted works.

..and for fun creativity on 'net, can you really beat mr.picassohead?