The 5 Best Free Online Photo Editors Reviewed and Compared

Posted 06/10/2010 at 5:32pm | by David Murphy

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Let’s face it: Photoshop ain’t cheap.  And, worse, Photoshop is a kind of software—much like most kinds of software—that only works offline.  If you’ve purchased it (or any other graphics-editing program, for that matter), yet you don’t have it installed on the system you’re currently working with, you’re out of luck.  No photo editing for you.

Besides, we live in the world of the Web nowadays.  With storage turning to the cloud and applications turning to the Internet, we question the need for an offline photo editing program to begin with. For as long as you have an internet connection, you don’t need to spend umpteen amounts of money in order to crop, tweak, and save your images—you can do it all right from the comfort of your Web browser of choice.  It’s free.  It’s easy.  And, best of all, there are plenty of different Web-based photo editors out there, which gives you the opportunity to pick-and-choose a particular service that best meets your needs.

Of course, we wouldn’t want to strand you in a sea of potential Web apps, which is exactly why this life preserver of a guide is going to walk you through the highs and lows of five of the Web’s most well-recognized photo editing tools.  We’ll assess each app based on the features it offers, how easy it is for an average PC user to grapple with said app’s interface, and the general user experience that each app delivers.  Here’s one good note to get you started, however: All of these Web apps are one-hundred-percent free.  Gratis.  Costs nothing.  On that point, everyone wins the day.

If you like this article, check out The Best Freeware Alternative to Photoshop

Aviary (Phoenix)

Just to steer away confusion from the start: The Phoenix image editor is part of the Aviary suite of online tools, so if you hear someone referencing the former and talking about audio editing or what-have-you, don’t get confused.

However, it’s an important note nevertheless, as one of Phoenix’s key strengths is its ability to interact with Aviary’s other apps—namely the effects-driven graphics tool Peacock and the vector-based design tool, Raven.  You can import the work you’ve previously done in either app as a new layer in the Flash-based Phoenix (sorry, iPad users) and, from there, you’re treated to the usual laundry list of features: Masking layers, grouping layers, blending layers in various ways based on a set alpha level, et cetera.

Since it’s a Flash app, one missing—and common—feature in Phoenix is the ability to right-click on anything and pull up a context menu based on one of the 11 “tools” the app provides.  Similarly, while you can perform Photoshop-style commands like holding CTRL and ALT to add and remove to selections, there’s no status bar nor cursor change that will indicate you’re actually doing (or can do)… that.  Just a user interface quibble, that’s all.

While it’s a wee annoying to have to register for a common Aviary login just to be able to save your files, the app nevertheless covers all the basic tasks one would need to accomplish in an online photo editing tool.  Cropping and resizing images is as easy as ever, the selection tools work fairly well for an online Web app (especially the ol’ magic wand), and everything from filling with gradients to adding text to images is well-constructed, albeit lacking in advanced options or features.

That said, you can still edit an image’s levels using the same histogram-type tool you’d find in Photoshop, so it’s not as if Phoenix is a newbie-only Web app. Don’t fire up the program and expect to experience wonders, but at the same time, the app’s no-frills approach covers a number of common scenarios without fault or confusion.

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