MediaMazine: February 2009
Tips and posts on media related stuff: photos, movies, sounds, etc.
If you love to create collages of all sorts from your pictures, then you know that positioning and moving individual pictures for a collage can be a time consuming process that requires many hours of experimentation. Naturally, all those extra hours mean that there is a limit to your creativity since you would not want to start all over again with a collage product.
Shape Collage, our review product frees you from these time concerns and lets you focus entirely on your creativity. Well, that's not entirely true since it also bundles oodles of creativity. Even better, the program is freeware and can create layered Photoshop files for your collage! When I saw this for the first time, it did look too good to sound true.
Read the review here...
OutWit Images is a cool, free Mozilla Firefox add-on includes a powerful image search and save engine. This Firefox 3 add-on is compatible with Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Labels: freeware, geetesh bajaj, photos, picture, powerpoint, presentations
You download and install this add-on from the Firefox Add-ons site, and end up with an OutWit Images button on your Firefox toolbar (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: OutWit Images button on the Firefox toolbar
Thereafter when you are browsing a page that has too many pictures, or some pictures you like -- just click the OutWit Images button to launch the OutWit Images application in a new window that starts with a black background filled with image previews, and little else as shown in Figure 2. In addition to using the active page as a starting point to launch OutWit Images, you can do the image searches within OutWit Images too (the top right of the interface shows a search box).
Figure 2: The OutWit Images interface
Click on any image and you'll see a larger preview of the image. Notice the horizontal pane below the search results -- that's called the Catch -- yes, that's "catch" as in fishing! You can drag any thumbnail you like, and drag it to the Catch area as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Drag an image to the Catch
Once the images are in the catch, they remain there even if you shut down the OutWit Images interface unless you clear them on your own. Images in the catch can be played in a slideshow, or saved as well. You can also send image links for all the images saved in the catch.
So what is the catch in providing an amazing add-on that's more like an application for free? Ariane Chang of OutWit Technologies says "there is no catch to our free software other than that we would like to get out name out there and make searching, collecting and saving many images at a time in a search -- thus especially useful when compiling presentations".
Thanks Ariane -- and for all of you who want to use OutWit Images to search for images to use in your PowerPoint presentations, make sure you you use only images that are copyright free, and allowed to be used in presentations!
