Online photo editors, why?

FotoFlexor is another online photo editor similiar to picnik who I've written about before, and pixer, pixenate, Phixr, snipshot, etc, etc...

FotoFlexor is easy enough to use, you upload or bring your photos in from many online photo sharing sites. You can do color correction, red eye removal, color effects, spatial effects, actually most of the basic things you can do in PhotoShop. FotoFlexor even has limited layer support. Overall it's a pretty good site and I think I may even like it better than picnik.

So the first question is "why are there so many online photo editors?" First off they all written using Flash. And what does flash give us? Great image tools! Most of the image enhancements are just U/I to what Flash provides. Easy enough. Flash also makes it fairly easy to perform image processing so you can take the alogithms that have been around for years and whoola we're Photoshop, sort of. So it fairly straightfoward "nothing is easy" to build one of these sites. So point number 1: We can build it maybe someone will come.

The second question is "who is going to use these sites?" If you compare the sites side by side with Photoshop you'll notice that processing time is much slower on the websites, especially with large camera files. So if your going to do a large number of image edits the web isn't the way to go. If you already have to offload the files from your camera to your computer before you upload them to the web why not just use a photo editing app on your computer. Even if you don't want to shell out the $$ for Photoshop there are many inexpensive or free photo editors out there like GimpShop, Paint.Net or Pixelmator. Just use them.

So if it's not traditional digital camera users who would find it advantageous to use these sites who is it? How about all those crazy kids with their camera phones. They don't typically connect to a computer to share they photos they just use picture mail or the like. They basically are e-mailing their photos to myspace pages, facebook or mycrappywebpage.com. Those camera phone photos in nightclubs with low light are notoriously horrible. So that's the market. Not Soccer Mom's with little Timmy's photos. It's punk kids with crappy photos of some girl they are going to tell all there buddies is their secret myspace friend. And they REALLY need to touch up that photo.

So maybe all these companies are writing these online photo editors in the hopes of getting bought by a Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, aka the GYM business plan.

Hum, maybe I should write one of these....