What will your baby look like? PhotoIsland.com will show you
Written: May 25 '00 (Updated May 25 '00)
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PhotoIsland.com is a really interesting site that gives novice graphics users powerful imaging capabilities through their own digital photographs. The site is not without its faults, however.
The good and cool
*Everything on the site except photo sharing is open to the public without registering. If you want to store photos and let friends access them, you just need to give basic information. No email confirmations needed. You get 10MB of storage space for free, but if you want another 40MB, there is a nominal fee.
* There are powerful photo manipulation capabilities that I've had a LOT of fun with. You can warp any .jpg photo so that you can see what you'd look like with a bigger nose, or a unabrow! I took a close up of my wife and warped it so much that she couldn't believe it was herself. The best Photo Workshop tool though is the morphing. Take two pictures, side by side, and align corresponding points (like nose, eyes, teeth), then hit "morph." You're brought to a meshed picture that has brought the two faces together to form a single one. Now you know what your kid will look like! :>) I've even morphed myself with my dog and it looked so real. If you don't have your own photos, they have some pretty cool samples of a young boy and a tiger.
* Photo sharing is very easy. You can create new albums with a single click, then quickly upload pictures directly from your computer. Manipulate them any way you want (like warping or morphing), or simply enhance them so they are clearer or brighter. Then you can send an invitation to a group of people, complete with a self-assigned password. The user interface is very nice with the album creation and viewing. Very little scrolling needed because they've put the navigation buttons on the top and the bottom of the page. The photos are displayed as decent sized thumb-nails, and visitors can click to get the details and captions. I would prefer if captions were displayed with the thumbnails. Another nice feature is that you can track how many visitors have come to view your albums, and they can leave messages in your guestbook.
* The photos you upload to the site can be put them on a variety of cool items, like baby onesies, mouse pads, clocks, etc. If you want to do this, PhotoIsland gives you a ton of manipulation options for how big you want the photo to be, what captions you want on the item, what layout you want, and they even suggest what will look best in terms of dpi (dots per inch).
The bad and ugly
*The site is inconsistent. Sometimes I can get photos to morph, other times I can't. Sometimes it lets me sign in, other times it doesn't. Once I went through the process of setting up the parameters to morph two pictures into one and the resulting pic was a completely different one that was contained in one of my albums. Weird.
* The site is run by Arc Software, so there are lots of plugs for their products. Easy to ignore, but they lead you down some rat holes if you go exploring.
So, overall, I've been very impressed with PhotoIsland. Mostly for the Photo Workshop capabilities that lets you do some crazy things, but if you haven't begun sharing photos via the web, this is a good place to start. Lots for everyone here.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Beauregard
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 - Top 500 |
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Location: Portland, Oregon
Reviews written: 129
Trusted by: 129 members
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