President of WebFX. Bill has over 25 years of experience in the Internet marketing industry specializing in SEO, UX, information architecture, marketing automation and more. William's background in scientific computing and education from Shippensburg and MIT provided the foundation for MarketingCloudFX and other key research and development projects at WebFX.

Web-based image editors have several advantages to its desktop counterparts. The most obvious benefit is that they allow you to work on any computer (that has a browser). In most cases, you can save your work online, avoid having to install desktop software, and interface with other web based services such as Flickr or Picasa. This article shares 6 of the finest, free online image editors that are capable alternatives to desktop applications like Adobe Photoshop and GIMP.

1. Pixlr

Pixlr is a very robust, Flash-based image editor that shares a similar user interface to Adobe Photoshop. The Pixlr API – which is still in its early stages of development – opens up possibilities of mash-ups an integration of Pixlr into your blog, web application, or website. It has a smart Wand tool to help you automatically select similar and adjacent pixels (which is equivalent to Photoshop’s Magic Wand tool).

Splashup is feature-packed online image editor that integrates with popular photo sharing services like Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook – allowing you to access your photos remotely. Some of the cool features that Splashup has are layers with blending modes, the ability to interface and capture images from your web cam, and a nice variety of filters and layer effects.

3. Phoenix

Phoenix, a powerful web-based image editor by Aviary, rivals the capabilities of desktop image editing applications. Check out this list of tutorials to fully appreciate the potential of this excellent image editor. You have to sign-up for an account to access Phoenix, but it only takes a few seconds and also gives you access to other Aviary tools and services such as Peacock (“Visual Laboratory”) and Toucan (color and swatch tool).

If you’re looking for an application to meet your simple photo-editing needs, check out pixer.us – a free, web-based photo editor. It has an intuitively simple interface and useful photo-editing features like cropping, resizing, and rotating. It also has some color adjustment options such as Saturation, Brightness, and Contrast adjustments. You can save your work as one of the four popular digital image files (PNG, JPG, GIF, or BMP).

5. FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer is a free, web-based photo editor that has tons of features but is still simple to use. Check out FotoFlexer’s demo page to see some of the useful capabilities of the application. FotoFlexer certainly does an excellent job for common photo-editing needs such as cropping, resizing, and rotating. It also integrates with popular web services such as Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, Facebook, MySpace and more.

6. SUMO Paint

SUMO Paint is a free, online image editor that allows you to edit and create images. It has a Shape tool that gives you the ability to draw unique shapes, a Brush tool with a surprisingly high-quality set of brushes, a Transform tool to help you scale, move, and rotate objects, and much more.

What’s your favorite?

Is your favorite web-based image editor not on the list? Share it with us in the comments, along with your experience and why you like it over other web-based image editors.

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