For a variety of reasons, there may be times when you’d prefer a sturdy online image editor over an installed one. Maybe you have a slower computer and just need to make a quick crop, and you don’t feel like waiting the 15 minutes for your fonts to load in Photoshop. Maybe you need to give a url to an employee who doesn’t have enough need for a graphics application to justify coughing up any dough over it, but they do occasionally need to do some clean-up, cropping or resizing. Whatever your reason, we’ve compiled and reviewed the best of the best online image editors here! They’re broken down by level of complexity and range of features, starting with the most basic.

Note: I have not included any of those wretched MySpace blinky image generators. Although some of the services featured here do support that crap, they have other very compelling redeeming values that made them worth mentioning. Whoever made those insipid blinky things popular should die in a fire.

Cropping/Resizing ONLY

Resize2Email Online Image Resizer - This tool is perfect for simple resizing and cropping. It doesn’t offer the ability to do any photo correction, filters or editing, but if you just need to resize or crop an image, this site is for you. Unlike its more advanced brethren (featured through the rest of this post), this simple site isn’t in Flash, so it loads up in the blink of an eye.

Another benefit is the ability to preset the size of the crop box, so if you need a thumbnail that is exactly 125×125, set the crop box, click NEXT, and you can move the crop selection box around the image until you find just the right thumbnail.

Features: crop, resize, rotate

Solid Photo Editing Options

DrPic.Com - This site has a nice little suite of tools that allow you to do more complex image manipulation very easily. It includes some basic filters such as gaussian blur, auto-fix, brightness/contrast, brush tool, text tool and a sharpen tool, as well as some nice frame presets that offer some neat effects, like the stacked photo sample below:

Features: crop, resize, rotate, gaussian blur, spread, text, brush, sharpen, brightness/contrast, auto-fix, oil paint, grayscale, preset frames, format conversion (jpg, bmp, gif, png)

Photoshop Express - Brought to you by Adobe, Photoshop Express is an ambitious attempt to create a scaled down version of Photoshop for the web. While its obviously not a replacement for Photoshop, especially not for PS power users, Express does offer a more advanced set of photo correction tools, including red-eye removal, saturation, hue, soft focus, sharpen, white balance, highlight, tint and more.

Because its more robust, this Flash-based service is a little slower to load than the aforementioned DrPic.Com, as one might expect.

Added Bonus: Photoshop Express can connect directly to Picasa, Facebook, Flickr, and Photobucket, so you can edit images in those accounts and not have to fuss with the download-then-edit-then-reupload hassle. It does require you to have a (free) Adobe.Com account.

Features: crop, resize, rotate, auto-fix, exposure, red-eye removal, touch-up, saturation, white balance, highlight, fill light, sharpen, soft focus, pop color, hue, black & white, tint, sketch, and distort.

Advanced Photo Editing Options & Animations

The next three contenders are by far the most feature-rich and complicated - although I have to admit, I can’t imagine when I would need or want 90% of the features they offer. Its good that they offer them, though, and your needs may not be the same as mine. Even though they are bulkier than I would need, they still certainly qualify as awesome, which is why they’re included.

For the sake of brevity, all of the sites detailed below have what I would consider the “basics”: crop, resize, rotate, sharpen, basic brightness/contrast adjustments, hue/color/tint adjustments, and some type of auto-correction.

Each one of the sites below also includes the ability to add text and shapes over the image, paint-bucket fills, and some degree of layer selection so that you can separate elements and move them independently of the main photo. All three also support interfacing with Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket.

FotoFlexer - This site bills itself as “The world’s most advanced online photo editor.” That’s a pretty bold statement, but if its not true, its damn close.

FotoFlexer has dozens of preset filters that you can apply and customize. While most of the filters they offer are likely to be of interest more to MySpace losers than anyone who reads this site (creating “fun” e-cards by inserting the photo face into a selection of “zany” preset images, “glitter text”, etc), some of their color filters are interesting.

Splashup - Honestly, the best way to describe Splashup is to ask you to imagine a pared down version of Photoshop that has more features - and even looks and feels more like the real Photoshop - than Adobe’s own Photoshop Express. If you’re comfortable in a traditional graphics program, such as Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, Splashup might be a good choice for you. If you’re looking for something a little more “wizardy”, this might be a little more complex than you want. It comes complete with layers palette, brush palette, shape marquees and more. Its written in Flash, and isn’t particularly fast to load initially, but once its loaded, its quite fast. Check the screenshot below and a full feature tour here:

Picknik - Like the other two mentioned in this section, Picnik has an wide array of decorative filters, specifically things like adding picture frames and adding preset shapes like speech balloons, hearts, and so on. It also supports curves and levels, for those users advanced enough to know what they are - and the curves menu comes complete with some handy time-saving presets. Bear in mind, the most interesting filters (like the “Panography-ish” filter, shown below) are NOT free, but come with a paid “premium” membership.

Whether or not you’re interested in the filters and shapes and “stickers”, the actual photo correction tools are impressive.

Aviary - Arguably saving the potentially best for last, the Aviary suite of tools, while still in development, looks like its going to be a real powerhouse. In its current BETA (invite-only, sorry!), the main image editor, named Phoenix, is not entirely unlike Splashup. It’s got a similar Photoshop interface feel to it, with some improvements over Splashup - namely some of the masking features. While Splashup and Phoenix’s core functionality is comparable, Aviary’s ultimate goal will potentially blow away Splashup (and everything else on this list) if it comes to pass. Their goal is to create a complete suite of tools, from vector tools to typography to audio editing to monetizing the content you create - all based around a community, and backed by version control. Aviary has the potential to completely change the way artists work collaboratively online. I’m excited about where they’re going - and in the meantime, Phoenix is already a rock-solid free online image editor.

For Aviary’s own comparison of online image editors, check their blog. The author admits there may be some bias towards Phoenix in the article, but the comparison actually seems very fair - and I’m speaking as someone with no affiliation to any of the products being compared. And for more, check out the CNET review.

Conclusion

Like most tools, its impossible to determine which is the “best” online image editor. That determination depends largely upon the needs and skill of the user. Designers who are more familiar with Photoshop will appreciate Splashup and Phoenix for their familiar interfaces and powerful editing tools, and the cookie-cutter limitations of FotoFlexer and Picnik may be frustrating. On the other hand, casual users may appreciate the one-click presets and wizard-style approaches of FotoFlexer and Picnik, and could easily get frustrated trying to figure out how to produce the same effects in Splashup or Phoenix.

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