Friday, January 27, 2012

Review: Photobucket


Web address:  www.photobucket.com

Price:  Free.  They do have a paid Pro upgrade.  (The Free version of this online program has been reviewed.)

How they describe themselves:
Photobucket is the place to store, create and share photos and videos for life. Upload all your best pictures, images, graphics, icons, and videos and share them by email or link them to your favorite sites like Facebook and Twitter. Personalize your photos by using our photo editor or make slideshows to share with friends. Join our large community by entering competitions or searching our huge photo and video library. Use Photobucket on the Web or on your mobile phone.  
Rating: A good alternative without some of Picnik's hoopy effects.

Before
See the The Mission for control details
After

I’ve been a long time user of Photobucket because it has this cool feature where you can upload your images, movies, animated gifs etc and it gives you the html code which I can then use on my blog. 
Until this week I had never used its photo editor and I must admit that I was impressed because I was able to use all the features I would of used in Picnik to edit my image.   Photobucket isn’t as user friendly or as pretty as Picnik but it has all the basic features.   It is less intuitive and you do have to seek out the features you are looking for.  But after a while I got use to where everything was.  

And as much as I could edit my photo to my liking, Photobucket doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that Picnik has, they have a limited number of frames, effects, fonts and stickers.  You are able to smooth, sharpen, fix blemishes and smooth wrinkles under the Beautify tab. The Geek tab has some useful items such as curves, smart resize, smart recolour and smart cutout.  Actually I thought the smart cutout was very cool.  I also appreciated the FotoFlexer video tutorials.

The ability to layer images was easy to use.  They do offer a collage feature, which wasn’t that easy to find, in fact I thought they didn’t have one until I stumbled upon it.  There aren’t as many collage combinations as Picnik.

Collage I put together to the
Handmade Cooperative's Great Pillowcase Challenge


On the plus side, as mentioned before, the image hosting is great, you can sort your photos into albums and you can share your images easily.

Uploading can take a while, depending on your internet and the size of your image. It can be quiet slow for no reason at all, a bit like Picnik.

I also found it a bit tricky saving photos down to my computer, you need to download the album as a zip file.  I really had to search to find out how to save my photos to my computer  and in the end I googling the answer. 

Feature Feature Available Comments
Rotate image
Yes
Easy
Crop image
Yes
Easy
Auto Fix
Yes
Easy
Add frame/boarder
Yes
Easy - Limited number
Add text
Yes
Easy - limited font options.
Collage
Yes
Moderate - Limited options and a little tricky to find
Photo Effects
Yes
Easy - a number of effects on offer
Stickers
Yes
Easy - A number of stickers available
Sharpen
Yes
Easy
Resize
Yes
Easy


Relates to: The Picniks Over and The Mission

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