Nebraska Learns 2.0’s Thing #40 is titled Funky Photos. It asked us to play around with both Aviary and Pixlr, both online photo editing services. You can see the results of my experiments at http://travelinlibrarian.info/2010/09/thing-40a-aviary-results/ & http://travelinlibrarian.info/2010/09/thing-40b-pixlr/.
So, what do I think of these services?
First, I tried Aviary. I’d played with this when it first arrived on the scene a few years ago and was basically impressed enough at the time. Now, I’m not too sure. Yesterday I tried to play with Aviary on three different computers and a total of four different browsers (Firefox, IE, and Chrome, testing Chrome both on Windows and Ubuntu) and Aviary consistently crashed every browser. Technically I think it was Flash that crashed but still it made it a bit impossible to work with. Today I tried again with Chrome on Windows and it worked better but things still weren’t happening when I chose certain tools. Turns out that I needed to disable to pop-up blocker for the site. Then I was finally able to get my work done. Even then one of the photos got cropped and I don’t know why.
On the plus side, I like the fact that Aviary also works as a hosting service allowing you to embed from their site a la Flickr. As far as I could tell, Pixlr doesn’t have that feature.
Pixlr was very simple to use and worked flawlessly. For what I needed it to do, it got the job done. Uplaods were smooth, nothing crashed, saving was quick, and no pop-ups to deal with. At this point I’d say Pixlr is the winner in this category.
I do want to say though that ultimately, I don’t have much use personally for either. I have basic off-line tools like Windows Live Photo Gallery, that allow me to do what I usually need to do to my photos. But, I can see how these tools can be of use to those with less powerful computers that just want to do some basic work on their photos, especially to make them a bit funky.
