If Picasa has taught us anything, it's that not every image editor has to be Photoshop. Sometimes you just want a quick, fun way to enhance your photos, add some neat effects, and maybe create a collage or two. If that sounds like fun and you happen to be rocking a Windows 8 device, you should check out Fotor, a free photo editor that uses the Modern interface. It's fast, visual, and has virtually no learning curve.

When you launch Fotor, it lets you open an existing photo to edit, or start working on a collage. It also comes with six sample photos arranged in an attractive grid, to get you started. The simplest way to get a feel for what Fotor is like is to click a sample photo. Do that, and you'll find yourself in the editing interface.

In editing mode, the image dominates most of the screen, and an editing toolbar lines the right side of the screen—opposite where you'd normally expect it, but in keeping with the Modern interface convention. The toolbar is subdivided into eight sections, six of which contain editing tools: Basic editing (color corrections), cropping, effects, borders, focus effects, and text tools. The other two sections let you open new files for editing, and save your work.

The color correction interface uses sliders, with live image updates: Just move the slider and see the change instantly. Cropping is similarly intuitive, with 11 preset aspect ratios, and a free-crop mode (to set your own aspect ratio). Just drag a frame across the image to set out your crop area, and click Confirm when you're happy with the composition.

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There's no such thing as the perfect photo. When we see the finished picture, there's always something about it that we wish we could change. This is more true with portraits than anything else. Pimples, dimples, baggy eyes, wrinkles…but these are all things that can now be removed, with the magic of Portrait Professional Studio.

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Srinivasan Kasturi followed my instructions in How to add permanent captions to your photos, and was disappointed that his captions didn't appear on the pictures themselves.

Srinivasan was the first of many readers who complained about this, and I have no one to blame but myself. Although I intended to offer a digital equivalent of writing a description on the back of a printed photo, the image I created to head that article (which also heads this one) suggested something different--the caption as part of the image.

So this time, I'm going to talk about making that caption visible. I'll discuss setting up slideshows and screensavers with captioned photos, and inserting the caption into the actual picture.

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It’s a common misconception that you need Photoshop to get really good looking photos. The truth is that there are many excellent image editors out there on the Internet that allow you to make changes to your photos which are as good as anything Photoshop could do. PC Image Editor is one such app, free for personal use ($20 for business use), which allows you to make changes to your images.

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Some people seem to think that if they find an image they like on Google Images, then they can just take it and use it how they please. If you are the owner of that photo, being exploited like that both cheapens your work and possibly loses you licensing fees. So the solution is to watermark the image, to make it obvious that the image is yours. My Watermark is a portable application that helps you do this quickly and easily.

My Watermark is a small portable application which you can place inside your Dropbox folder or on a USB stick. When you start it up, its first drawback becomes immediately evident–the app is donationware, which in this case means it’s free to use, but for as long as you don’t donate a minimum of $10, you are going to see a nag screen every time you start the app up, and every photo you watermark with this app for will have the developer’s website URL on it.

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With each new iPhone, Apple has improved its picture-taking capabilities. So much so that many folks now rely on an iPhone as their primary picture-taking device. iTunes, however, just hasn't kept up. While Apple's software excels as a tool for managing your iOS apps, music, and videos, it treats your photos like an afterthought. Sure, it lets you sync photos from your computer to your iOS device, but it doesn't offer any help in downloading the pictures you capture with your iPhone, nor previews of your pictures. That's exactly what CopyTrans Photos does. This application is pricey, at $20, but it does offer a decent tool for managing the photos you capture with your iPhone or iPad.

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When you take a digital photo, you are taking more than just the photo. You are also capturing a whole range of personally identifiable information which could compromise your privacy if it ever fell into the wrong hands. That information is called EXIF metadata and a lot of people don’t even realize that this data is embedded inside their images. The good news though is that it can be easily removed with a program such as ExifCleaner ($19, 30-day free trial).

What kind of information are we talking about?  Well it can range from the mundane such as the make and model of the camera that took the picture, the picture resolution, the light source, and so on. But it can also be as serious as where you took the photo and what date you took it, and this information may be preserved when you post a photo online. So anyone looking to track you down knows where you are in the world, and anyone wanting to tie you to a specific place at a specific time only has to look at the EXIF data. This can be particularly serious for people who live in oppressive regimes, journalists and bloggers looking to protect a source, and whistleblowers who want to keep their identity secret.

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Asoftech Photo Recovery is an effective, but not perfect, program that recovers documents as well as photos and video from memory cards. It didn't recover some of the tougher items in my tests, but neither does most of the competition. The demo will find files, but not recover them (like most recovery programs). For that, you will need the full version, which costs $30.

I tested Asoftech Photo Recovery by trying to recover some files erased from an SDHC card. Photos--no problem, documents--no problem, video from my Canon 230SX--a problem. The program didn't find the separate, linked headers that this Canon camera writes to the card, that are required for the .mov files to play properly. Only one program I've tried recovered these headers--the free, command line-based PhotoRec (though they must still be reconstructed by hand with a hex/sector editor such as Hexedit).

Though it's bright purple and not particularly sophisticated, the Asoftech Photo Recovery interface is easy to use, and you can limit the types of files you're looking for, which speeds up the scan process. But with freebies such as PhotoRec and Recuva available that work as well or better, it's hard to recommend any pay program until you reach the level of more powerful (and complex) programs like R-Studio Data Recovery and its ilk.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

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There are many recovery programs dedicated to recovering photos and other multimedia files from memory cards. Most, such as Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery 5 work well—assuming they don't encounter anything oddball.

I put Phoenix Photo Recovery 5 through its paces with some files erased from an SDHC card and it found nearly everything, including all my deleted photos, and some of the .mov files I'd erased. However, it did not find the separate, linked headers that the Canon camera writes to the card. Without these headers, the recovered .mov files won't play. To be fair, only one program I've tried recovered these headers—the free, command line-based PhotoRec—and even it wouldn't merge them with the corresponding data files. Currently, to the best of my knowledge, you must use a hex/sector editor such as hexedit and merge these files manually.

Stellar Phoenix works as well as most of the myriad pay photo recovery programs I've tried and its simple interface and straightforward approach make it easy to master. However, when there's a free alternative such as PhotoRec that works as well or better, any pay program is going to be a tough sell.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

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You have all of these digital photos stashed away in the corners of your hard drive. They'd make a lovely gift or year-end memento. You could print them out and slide them into a photo album—but that's so 2002, and we're down to the wire for holiday shipping as is. Why not create a slick online slideshow instead? There are several software programs and Web services that can help. Here are a few of our favorites.

Add art and animation with Smilebox

Smilebox is as fun and friendly as the name suggests. It offers an easy way to create animated slideshows that are heavy on background art and animations, and also includes templates for creating electronic greeting cards, photo albums, and scrapbooks, too.

Like most of the applications and services tested for this article, Smilebox calls attention to its free offering. All you need to do in order to use Smilebox is sign up for a free account with your email address. But, like all of the applications and services we tested, Smilebox's free offering is very limited, allowing you to do little more than create and share very simple slideshows. If you'd like to do anything more—and "more" includes accessing many of the most popular slideshow templates, such as the only plain one I could find—you need to pay $40 a year to join Club Smilebox. Doing so gets you access to all of its templates, as well as the ability to share ad-free slideshows in full screen, add music to your slideshows, and store your creations.

Smilebox displays your uploaded photos in a column on the left of the screen. It arranges the photos to look like they've been scattered on a table, which is cool, but not as useful as if they were laid out in neat order. And when you add a photo to a slide, it's not removed from the pile, which can be confusing if you're working with a lot of photos.

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PhotoPeach is a Web-based slideshow builder that makes it easy to get started. The service directs you to upload your photos, either from your computer or an online service. But where rival PhotoSnack supports a whole host of online services, PhotoPeach is limited to Facebook and Picasa. That limitation would be acceptable if PhotoPeach’s connection with those services worked, but I had trouble accessing any photos from Facebook: PhotoPeach bounced me to that site to log in, but never let me access my photo albums. The connection with Picasa worked flawlessly, though.

If you’re using the free version of PhotoPeach, you’ll be limited to including 30 photos in your slideshow; any more and you have to subscribe to the $3-per-month Premium version. The Premium account also lets you upload your own music to accompany your slideshow, burn your slideshows to disc, and customize the transitions between photos.

Once your photos are uploaded, you can set the time interval for photos and the music you’d like to accompany your slideshow. If you haven’t opted for a premium account, you’re limited to PhotoPeach’s small selection of background music or you can opt to search YouTube for a song of your liking. PhotoPeach doesn’t offer any background templates; instead it keeps the focus right on your photos, which is a nice touch. It offers limited customization options, but casual users will find enough here to meet their needs.

And that’s it: PhotoPeach then displays your slideshow. If you’re a Premium member, you can burn it to DVD; users of the free service can share it via email or through various Web sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

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PhotoSnack is an entirely Web-based slideshow creator, no software downloads required. To get started, you simply sign in with your Facebook, Google, or Twitter account or your email address. Like Smilebox, Photosnack offers a free but limited version; it brands your slideshows with a watermark if you'd like to publish them. If you'd like to publish your slideshow without this mark, you have two choices: You can pay $14 per month for a VIP membership or you can buy points, which you purchase as needed to publish slideshows. Points range in price from $1.90 to .86 each, depending on how many you buy. You need six points to remove the watermark and get a code to embed your slideshow elsewhere; buying just six points will cost you $11.40.

While the points micropayment system may sound slightly confusing, it's actually quite easy once you begin using it. So, too, is creating a slideshow using PhotoSnack. The Web-based app guides you to upload photos, letting you select from those stored on your computer or in various online sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, Instagram, and more.

Once your photos are uploaded, you choose the template for your slideshow. There are fewer than 10 templates available, which is far fewer than Smilebox offers, but Photosnack's templates are focused on your photos. Smilebox offers templates that are more design-focused—an autumn template features leaves falling in the background and a memorial template features a burning candle, for example, while PhotoSnack's templates revolve around the way your photos are displayed. The Simple Fade design, for example, fades from one photo to another, while the Photo Slide slides your snapshots along. I like that you can switch between the templates easily, to see how each one looks with your photos, and you can set the background colors, the size of the photos, and the audio track (you can choose one of PhotoSnack's tunes or upload your own MP3).

The one downside to PhotoSnack’s templates is that only a few of them support autoplay. If the template doesn’t support it, your viewers will have to manually click through your photos in order to see all of them. It would be nice if all of the templates gave the viewer the option, instead.

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As fun and friendly as its name suggests, Smilebox offers an easy way to create animated slideshows. It also includes templates for creating electronic greeting cards, photo albums, and scrapbooks, too. Although Smilebox calls attention to its free offering, many features—including the most popular templates—require the $40/year subscription. Smilebox offers separate installers for Windows and Mac.

All you need to do in order to use Smilebox is sign up for a free account with your email address. But Smilebox's free offering is very limited, allowing you to do little more than create and share very simple slideshows. If you'd like to do anything more—and "more" includes accessing many of the most popular slideshow templates, such as the only plain one I could find—you need to pay $40 a year to join Club Smilebox. Doing so gets you access to all of its templates, as well as the ability to share ad-free slideshows in full screen, add music to your slideshows, and store your creations.

Smilebox displays your uploaded photos in a column on the left of the screen. It arranges the photos to look like they've been scattered on a table, which is cool, but not as useful as if they were laid out in neat order. And when you add a photo to a slide, it's not removed from the pile, which can be confusing if you're working with a lot of photos.

Smilebox offers plenty of slideshow templates to choose from, and while the number of available templates can seem daunting, they are neatly arranged into categories (such as "Seasonal" and "Special Days") that make them easier to browse. Unfortunately, though, not all of the templates offer the same options. Some, for example, allow you to adjust the speed of your photo display, while others don't. Smilebox says this is because it retains some of its older designs that are popular with users, and these lack the more robust controls that the newer designs offer. I also wish that changing a template were easier: Once you create a slideshow in one template, you can't simply switch over to another template to compare. Instead, you have to start over from scratch.

Saving and sharing your slideshows is easy, though, as Smilebox lets you decide whether to send it via email, post it to Facebook, a blog, or another Web site, print it, or save it to a DVD or a file. And the end results are polished enough for sharing with groups large and small.

While Smilebox lacks some of the fine-tuned controls that professionals and perfectionists will want, it still offers a quick and easy way to create polished slideshows for sharing.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software appropriate to your system.

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To millions of people around the world, the name Photoshop inspires images of sharks leaping out at helicopters, phony disaster photos, and retouched celebrity shots. Now, the original computer code that started it all is available for inspection.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California recently made the source code of Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 available as a download for noncommercial use. Originally released for the Macintosh in 1990, Photoshop has become synonymous with sophisticated photo editing (including some creative photo hoaxes).

The original program that would become Photoshop was written in the late 1980s by Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan. He and his brother John, who worked at Industrial Light and Magic, developed Photoshop into a full-fledged consumer-ready application. The first commercial release from slide scanner maker Barneyscan only sold about 200 copies under the name Barneyscan XP, and came bundled with the company’s hardware. Soon after that initial commercial foray, Adobe licensed the rights from the Knolls and released an improved version of the program, Photoshop 1.0.

creativebits.org

At its original release, Macworld called Photoshop 1.0 easy to use. “Considering the vast number of features and tools involved,” Macworld said. “Adobe has done a good job of keeping things organized and simple.”

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A class action lawsuit has been filed against Instagram over the company’s controversial update to its terms of service last week.

The civil lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Instagram of violating the property rights of its users and breaching its existing terms of service. It was filed initially on behalf of a single user but says there are “tens of thousands of members” in the state whose rights were violated by Instagram’s update.

“Plaintiff is acting to preserve valuable and important property, statutory, and legal rights, through injunctive, declaratory and equitable relief issued by this Court before such claims are forever barred by adoption of Instagram’s New Terms,” the filing said.

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Put down those artistically filtered torches and pitchforks: Instagram is dialing back its unpopular terms of service update.

After Instagram users began exporting their photos and deleting their accounts en masse, the photo-sharing service on Tuesday wrote a blog post to clarify the terms of service changes that sparked fury on the Internet the past two days.

At issue were concerns over whether Instagram would sell your photos to be used in advertisements without your permission or compensation, as the policy seemed to indicate. High-profile Instagram users, including photographers and bloggers, had threatened to abandon the site—if they hadn’t left already.

In a post titled, “Thank you, and we’re listening,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said “legal documents are easy to misinterpret.”

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Nik Software's robust photo editing app, Snapseed, has finally made its way to Android. The app, which is also available on iOS, lets you edit your photos using simple gesture controls, and allows you to share your newly-minted masterpieces via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

One of the best things about Snapseed is its relative ease of use. The app makes it extremely easy to change certain aspects of your photos without having to dig through countless menus or take a class at your local learning annex. Most edits can be done with a simple swipe, and you can always undo any changes you make. The basic controls lend themselves well to editing on a smaller screen, though the app is best experienced on a 7 or 10-inch tablet.

So if you're sick of Instagram and really want to make your photos pop, check out Snapseed. The app is available for free from the Google Play store, and is a must have for anyone that likes using their phone to take pictures.

A security researcher published on Friday another attack on Facebook's Instagram photo-sharing service that could allow a hacker to seize control of a victim's account.

The attack was developed by Carlos Reventlov around a vulnerability he found within Instagram in mid-November. He notified Instagram of the problem on Nov. 11, but as of last Tuesday, it had not been fixed.

The vulnerability is in the 3.1.2 version of Instagram's application, released on Oct. 23, for the iPhone. Reventlov found that while some sensitive activities, such as logging in and editing profile data, are encrypted when sent to Instagram, other data was sent in plain-text. He tested the two attacks on an iPhone 4 running iOS 6, where he first found the problem.

"When the victim starts the Instagram app, a plain-text cookie is sent to the Instagram server," Reventlov wrote. "Once the attacker gets the cookie he is able to craft special HTTP requests for getting data and deleting photos."

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The rivalry between Google and Facebook is stepping up a notch after Google on Monday acquired Nik Software, the German company behind Snapseed, a popular iOS photo app. Snapseed is a photo manipulation app that also uses filters in a similar way to Facebook-owned Instagram does. Snapseed was previously Apple’s pick for the iPad App of the Year.

As part of the same announcement, Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, declared that Google+ reached 400 million signups, 100 million of which are monthly active users. Facebook still leads as the biggest social network with more than 950 million monthly active users.

In many ways, Snapseed is very similar to Instagram, which Facebook bought earlier this year for 1 billion. You can use filters for photos, as well as frames and effects such as tilt shift, but the app lacks its own social network compared to Instagram. Snapseed also only has 9 million users while Instagram announced in July it has 100 million users. Instagram is free to download and Snapseed costs $4.99.

Even though Snapseed is not as popular as Instagram, the app has its own following among photo enthusiasts and is a good match for Google+, which has an emphasis on photo sharing. If Google’s joint announcement on the Nik Software acquisition and Google+ stats was not enough of a hint that Snapseed will be somehow integrated into Google+, The Verge reports that the portion of the company that worked on Snapseed will work directly on the social network.

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Instagram’s more than 50 million users know the mobile app is fun to use because its filters and frames give plain old photos pizzazz. Not only that, but its social features let you share your snapshots with friends and keep up with the images others are posting, just by opening the app on your smartphone.

But now there’s a different way to see what people are shooting—a new website called This is Now, which aggregates the real-time Instagram updates in five cities around the world.

At the site you can see a dizzying display of what geo-tagged photos people are uploading in New York, London, Sydney, Sao Paulo, and Tokyo. Click on “What is this” at the top left of each city page and This is Now lists a slew of numbers: The number of photos uploaded, how many people clicked on them, the average stay on each city page (and how much time you’ve wasted there yourself). At the top right of each city page you can also see how many people are viewing it at the moment.

This is Now is an interesting way to get a feel for what’s going on in the cities it tracks, although the way the photos quickly move across the site from left to right and then down the page can be bothersome when Instagram activity is high. For a more sedate experience, check one of the cities where the time of day has most people sleeping.

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Arcticsid asked the Photo Editing forum for a way to add captions to his photos. "In the old days we could write a description on the back."

I'm assuming you're saving and sharing those photos as .jpg files. And that gives you an advantage, because jpegs have captions build in as part of the format's metadata.

Metadata is a particular kind of data that explains a file's content, and most file types contain their own metadata fields. For instance, a jpeg's metadata includes the camera model, resolution, the date the photo was taken, and other bits of information. To view and potentially change a file's metadata, right-click it, select Properties, and click the Details tab.

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John McClung asked if there's a way to speed up and slow down slide shows in Windows 8's photo app.

If you're talking about the obvious app that sits where you can't miss it on the home screen, the answer is no. Luckily, that's not the only photo slideshow tool that comes with Windows 8. You just have to know where to find the other one.

Let's look at both of them.

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C. Corder asked me to recommend a program to help him find duplicate photos.

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Duplicate files of all types can be a problem, especially if you're running low on disk space. But duplicate photos bring their own challenges. Because of how we take and handle digital pictures, we tend to end up with multiple versions of the same photos, as well as separate but near-identical images.

For instance, your hard drive may contain an original, full-sized picture, and the smaller version you mailed to family. Or the original and the cropped one. And then there are light adjustments, conversions to black and white, and experiments with photo-editing tools. And let's not forget the near-identical pictures you take in your camera's burst mode. If you're trying to slim down your Pictures library, you'll want to be able to find all of these and decide which ones to keep.

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I’ve amassed more than 30,000 digital photos over the years. I shot most of them; others I scanned from prints gleaned from photo albums and family archives. I’d wager that 95 percent of them are junk—poorly composed, badly lit, over- or underexposed, people with their eyes closed, you name it.

None of them, however, are so terrible that I’d want to obliterate them. As the family historian, I recognize that even the most casual snapshot has some intrinsic value; but who has the time to sort through that many pictures to find the 10 or 20 in a given category that are worth showing off? And what’s the best way to ensure that these best-of-the-best photos not only appear on all my mobile devices, but in places and on services that allow interested friends and family to see them, too?

The secret, not surprisingly, is to let a computer do the heavy lifting. I auditioned three of the latest consumer-oriented photo-editing/organizing tools on the market: ACDSee Pro 6, Adobe Photoshop Elements 11, and Cyberlink PhotoDirector 4 to determine which product was the most capable of helping me separate the wheat from the chaff—and then sharing the wheat.

I didn’t spend a lot of time evaluating the editing tools in these packages, since my primary objective was to find the photos that were worth editing in the first place. I will produce a complete three-way comparison down the road; but for this project, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 11 quickly rose above the other two to become my favorite organizational tool.

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If you're not using Google Picasa to manage your photos, I think you're missing out. It's one of the fastest and most versatile photo managers/image editors currently available, and you can't beat the price. (It's free.)

If you are already using it, you might be missing out on one of its best--and most often overlooked--features. I'm talking about the Picasa screensaver, which was formerly a standalone product (Google Photos Screensaver) bundled with the now-discontinued Google Pack.

The screensaver cycles through the photos of your choice (more on that in a minute) using any of nine impressive visual effects: pan and zoom, cross-fade, checkerboard, and so on. Here's how to set it up:

1. Start Picasa.

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Read on for tips to keep iTunes in line, to avoid stuttering streams, and to automate photo uploads.

iTunes Tricks

Auto-add to iTunes: iTunes 9 introduced an ‘Automatically Add To iTunes' folder (located by default at C:\Users\username\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media); iTunes monitors this folder for new files and appropriately sorts the ones it finds. Download new music and videos to this folder, and you won't have to organize them later.

Keep your feeds going: iTunes will automatically stop up­­dating your podcast subscriptions if you don't listen to them. A simple Visual Basic script automatically marks all of your unplayed podcasts as played, causing iTunes to continue updating them. Use Windows' built-in Task Scheduler to set the script to run every week or so.

Clean up your music: You don't really need four copies of the same song in your iTunes library--even if it's really good. So select File, Display Duplicates, and start deleting.

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Reader Bruce has a weird, weird problem with his XP-powered Toshiba laptop: If he tries to open any JPEG or PNG image file saved to the Windows Desktop, it appears momentarily in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, then disappears.

Interestingly, if the pictures are located in any other folder, they open just fine. Likewise, if Bruce right-clicks a picture and chooses Open, they open just fine. It's only double-clicking them on the Desktop that creates this problem.

I've done some research on your behalf, Bruce, and I'm sorry to say I don't have an answer. I do, however, have a workaround: Use a different image viewer.

Though I can see the appeal of using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, which is quick, compact, and built right into Windows, it's not good for anything other than, well, viewing.

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Jack Douglas wants a way to add comments or descriptions his files.

What you're referring to is called metadata--data that describes the contents of a file (as opposed to plain old regular data, which is the contents of the file). Different file formats have different metadata fields. You can see and edit a file's metadata by right-clicking the file, selecting Properties, and clicking the Details tab.

If there is no Details tab, that file format doesn't support metadata.

A number of popular file formats contain a Comments field in their metadata. These include.jpg, .doc, .docx, .xls, and .xlsx. When you go to the Details tab in any of these files, you'll find a Comments field that you can read and edit.

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A few weeks ago, I discussed five reasons why you should consider using Windows Live Photo Gallery. It's my favorite free photo editor and organizer; I really like the overall design of the program, which makes it easy to organize and find photos quickly. And Photo Gallery's extras--like Photo Fuse and panoramic stitching--are superb. But several readers asked me how Photo Gallery stacks up against another popular free photo organizer/editor: Google's Picasa. So this week, let's take a look at the latest version of that program.

A Window Into Your Photo Folders

No-Risk Editing

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