Over the past few months, a flury of online image editing tools have been released, including Phixr, Picnik, Pixer, and Snipshot. They all make it easy to remove red eyes on a picture, or apply a sepia filter to it, but they fall short when being used for web development.

When developing a website, you often need to crop pictures to the pixel, and resize them to a specific size that will neatly fit into your page design. I find myself having such a need for adding the logos of partners on the Intalio website for example. Problem is, most applications I have tried do not have zooming capabilities, making precise cropping virtually impossible. And as far as resizing goes, its usually down through handles displayed around the picture, as opposed to direct entry of the desired size, making the exercise quite tricky.

One solution I found for dealing with the sizing issue is to upload my pictures onto Flickr, and click on the different sizes link, which gives you five available sizes, Square, Thumbnail, Small, Medium, Large. If youre lucky, one will match the one you need. That being said, I hate having to rely on luck when trying to get productive with Office 2.0 applications, therefore I hope that the good folks at Phixr, Picnik, Pixer, or Snipshot will read this and make the necessary improvements to their otherwise pretty cool applications.