There are a lot of software available that will let you turn your pictures into works of art. With all these options, though, the software can get overwhelming, and it’s difficult to know which product is best for you. So I’ve done the research for you to find the best online photo editors. Read on!
As a web developer, you’re probably already familiar with the productivity-enhancing power of image editing software. Whether you’re cropping or resizing pictures for your portfolio or designing layouts for your clients, online image editors are simple to use and great for beginners. And best of all, they cost nothing to use!
Canva
Best free online photo editor for collaborating with teams.
Canva is a popular online design and publishing solution, with a free online photo and image editor as part of the package. Canva’s users have created over 1 billion designs since the tool launched in 2013.
Canva’s free service gives you 250,000 templates to customise and 5GB of cloud storage to save your designs.
The online free photo editor requires registration; then, you can apply filters, resize images, and add text overlays.
If you like Canva and opt to pay the $99 annual subscription, you can schedule social media posts, create brand kits, and use 100GB of cloud storage.
Features include:
- Quickly add stickers and drag and drop speech bubbles.
- Straighten photos and apply textures and filters to enhance your images.
- Add photo frames to images
- Add animated text.
- Templates sized for most social media platforms.
- Offers a desktop client for Mac and Windows, plus smartphone apps too.
Link: Canva
Taler
Best free online photo editor with free graphic design templateshttps://www.youtube.com/embed/cvq9mGXGZ3c
Taler is a scrappy new social design and photo editing tool that’s free forever and perfect for launching a new business, brand, or store. With Taler you can customize templates for Instagram Stories, t-shirt mock ups, and social banners for Facebook and YouTube.
New templates are being added every week, with more design sizes for all social platforms coming soon. Think of Taler as a sandbox for creating your digital branding with some great starter styles to help entrepreneurs grow their Shopify stores faster.
Features include:
- Hundreds of customizable design templates tailored to size requirements for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more.
- Drag-and-drop editor for easily customizing visual content to match your Shopify theme.
- Powerful suite of filters, overlays, and photo editing tools for carefully refining and adjusting your header template design.
- Text tools to move, resize, and color text to amplify your message.
- Over 17,000 high-resolution, royalty-free images to use in your design.
- Free stickers, shapes, emojis, and graphics.
Available for: iOS and Android
Price: Free
GIMP
Best open source online photo editor for pixel art and animation
GIMP is a free photo editor online that’s considered the best free Adobe Photoshop alternative. It comes packed with professional tools for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, and converting different image formats.
Whether you’re a hobby photographer or learning how to take photos with a smartphone, GIMP gives you sophisticated tools for making your images standout. GIMP also has a full customizable interface and, since it’s open source, you can add your own filters and features.
Features include:
- Fully customizable interface for making changes to the photo editor that meet your needs.
- Powerful photo enhancement tools for fixing distort and imperfections.
- Digital retouching for getting rid of minor details quickly and easily.
- Hardware support for various devices to create custom tools and speed up workflow.
- File format support for JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF and other special use formats, including the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files.
Available for: GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows
Price: Free
Fotor
Best free photo editor online for beginners
Free photo editor Fotor is a browser-based option with an interface that makes it easy for creatives, photographers, and marketers to edit photos. Unlike other web-based programs, Fotor is fast and won’t slow up your computer while using it.
Fotor makes advanced photo editing techniques achievable for less-technical people. You can easily apply filters, add effect, and edit images on the go. It’s intuitive and simple application helps you do more with your photos even without a background in photo editing and graphic design. Fotor is one of the best free photo editors out there, though for a small monthly fee you can upgrade to Pro for added features.
Features include:
- One click batch processing for Scenes, Effects, and Borders.
- State-of-the-art photo processing engine for adjusting exposure, brightness, contrast, white balance, and saturation, removing red eye, and more.
- Flexible text editing tool for adding text to any photo.
- Collage tool with over 80 templates and up to nine photos per collage.
- Batch resizing, renaming, and file format conversion.
- 100+ exclusive photo effects, 30+ photo frames, and 300+ custom stickers.
Available for: Web, iOS, Windows
Price: Free, ($4.99 per month for Pro)
Inkscape
Best free photo editor online for creating vector graphics
One of Inkscape’s strengths as a stand-out free photo editor is its ability to create and manipulate objects. It’s considered an excellent free alternative to Adobe Illustrator, with an ease-to-use and clear interface.
The software uses the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format, so you can create graphics and use them in other marketing assets, like banners or social media posts, without distorting them. Like GIMP, above, Inkscape is open source, which means you can customize the photo editing software to fit the needs of your business.
Features include:
- User-friendly tool for creating vector graphics.
- Suite of pencil, pen, calligraphy, and shaping and cloning tools for creating your own images.
- Compliant SVG format file generation and editing.
- Easy-to-use object manipulation tools for moving, skewing, cropping, and rotating images.
- Simple node editing for efficiently modifying images.
Available for: Linux, Windows and macOS
Price: Free
Adobe Photoshop Express
Best free online photo and image editor for mobile.
Adobe Photoshop is the gold standard in image editing. So good that the name is used as a verb to describe image enhancement. Alongside their premium product, Adobe also offers a free smartphone image editor called Adobe Photoshop Express for editing on the go.
It’s free to download, and you can access the tool with a Google or Facebook account. The
Adobe Photoshop Express app lets you quickly improve your images using filters it calls ‘looks’. Plus, you can also add text, correct image faults like red-eye, and use textures to add that finishing touch.
A premium subscription package is available, which has more advanced tools like cloning and RAW image editing.
Features include:
- Stich photos together to create a collage.
- Artistically blur parts of your photo.
- Straighten images with perspective correction.
- Blend your photos with creative textures.
- Remove haze and fog using an easy slider.
- Add captions to create meme style images.
Link: iOS devices Android devices
Instasize
One of the best free online image editors for influencers.
Instasize is the free online photo editor app for working with images before uploading them on social media. While the name hints it’s for Instagram, you can upload your edited image to any social platform.
There is a range of filters to improve your images instantly, and you can use layers to add backgrounds to your photos. What’s more, you can also add text, vintage overlays, and even edit short videos all on your smartphone.
If you don’t have the image you need, there is also a library of stock images to work from. The premium version includes 100+ filters not available in the free app and advanced beauty tools to fix blemishes, remove redness, and whiten teeth.
Features include:
- Over 130 filters grouped by colour and type.
- Apply vintage overlays.
- Add a text layer to photo and video.
- Resize narrow images automatically.
- Hundreds of backgrounds.
- One-click presets to resize your image for different social platforms.
Link: iOS app Android app
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Pixlr
Best browser-based free image editor for a quick touch-up.
Pixlr is a suite of free online photo editing tools. It’s browser-based, so you can use it on any computer, and there is a mobile version you can use with your smartphone’s browser.
One helpful feature is the background removal tool. The tool uses AI to detect the main object of your photo and removes the rest of the image. You can then download the picture as a .png file with a transparent background to paste into another setting.
You can also touch up any image using a wide range of tools and apply filters and effects to transform your photo.
Features include:
- Work with layers, objects, and custom brush sizes.
- Do complex edits in fewer steps using advanced tools.
- Includes pre-sized templates for the major social media platforms.
- Add stickers, borders, and text overlays.
- Remove backgrounds with an AI-powered one-click tool.
- Create flyers, business cards, and photo collages.
Link: Pixlr
BeFunky
Best free online photo editor for one-click editing.
BeFunky is a free online photo editor that’s simple to use and easy to learn. It can apply lots of different effects to an image with a few clicks. One of the standout features is a ‘Cartoonizer’ which converts any photo into a cartoon with one click.
There are more businesslike tools as well. If you need to create brochures or flyers, BeFunky is an ideal tool for creatives to produce marketing assets quickly.
BeFunky is free to use, but if you want to access some of the more advanced tools, it costs $4.99 per month.
Features include:
- Crop, resize, and remove backgrounds.
- Touch up tools to fix image problems.
- Convert any photo into a cartoon.
- Add texture to backgrounds or make them transparent.
- Hundreds of photo effects and filters.
- Batch image editing tool.
Link: BeFunky
Photopea
If you’re worried that online photo editors won’t have enough features, Photopea will put your mind at least. This is virtually indistinguishable from a regular desktop app, and it is a hugely impressive photo editor.
In terms of look and feel, Photopea sits roughly hallway between Photoshop and GIMP, and the range, depth and power of the tools and features it offers is simply staggering. To appeal to advanced users, there is support for Photoshop’s native file format as full support for layers, allowing for greater levels of creativity. Image can be uploaded from your computer, or you can work with online images by providing the relevant URL. When it comes to saving files, you have no fewer than 15 popular file formats to export to.
With a selection of powerful filters, a range of selection and masking tools, multi-levels undo, and even the Photoshop-aping Spot Healing Brush, you’d be hard pressed to find something Photopea fails at. It could be argued that for some people – certainly some tasks – Photopea is a bit too much. This really is an advanced image editor, and it’s hard to hold that against it.
Pricing is entirely reasonable too. There is a free version which has only two limitations – there are ads and undo is restricted to 30 steps. Pay for a Premium account, however ($40 for a year, or about £30 / AU$50), and ads vanish, and you can undo up to 60 actions.
Lunapic
Look past Lunapic‘s slightly unimpressive interface, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by this online photo editor. You can upload an image you would like to work with, provide the URL of one that’s already online, or pull in content from Facebook or various other social platforms.
The slightly unusual interface mixes a semi-traditional set of image editing tools in a toolbar to the left of the screen, a series of menu options across the top, and links and buttons to tools you might want to access quickly. You can work with gradients, apply a good range of quality filters, add stylized effects, and even create simple animations.
To help get you started, there are a range of tutorial available via the Help menu. These serve as a great introduction to some of the theories of image editing for newcomers to the field, but also give specific advice about how to achieve various results in Lunapic.
Pixlr X
Pixlr X looks like a modern desktop photo editor, and has a range of tools that put many installable apps to shame. As you would expect, you can upload images to work with, or provide the URL of an online image to edit instead.
This done, a vertical toolbar to the left of the page gives access to familiar editing tools broken down into a number of sections – Arrange & Style, Text, Layout, Adjust & Filter, and so on. Within each of these sections is a new sub-toolbar filled with the associated tools and options. Some, such as simple effects, can be applied by just clicking a preview thumbnail, while others allow for greater customization through the manipulation of sliders and settings.https://5b7a31ed757bed1be379bcd9071f0d79.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Using Pixlr X, it’s possible to get very quick results if that’s what you’re looking for, and there is the ever-useful healing brush on hand to tidy up images and clear up blemishes in an instant. However, it’s also possible to get quite hands-on and spend time editing things to perfection, taking full advantage of layers to create stunning results.
Newcomers may find the toolbars and buttons are a little difficult to interpret to start with, but once you have mastered this, the learning curve is pretty gentle.
piZap
Best online image editor for novice users.
piZap is a browser-based free online photo editor. Free online photo editors like PiZap are easy to use and have four quick start icons at the top of the editor. You can work on an image uploaded from your computer, Facebook, or Dropbox. But if you don’t have the image you need, you can select from an extensive range of free stock images.
Once your image loads, you can apply filters, edit the colours, and add text and other overlays.
piZap is free to use for seven days, so you can utilise the tool’s full functionality after a quick registration process. If you want to keep on using the tool, it’s reasonably priced at $2.99 per month.
Features include:
- Themed borders.
- Cut-out tool for removing an image background.
- Templates sized for popular social media platforms.
- Also works on iPad and smartphone.
- Apply text with special effects like glitter.
- Meme editor with a choice of popular templates.
Link: piZap
Conclusion
If you are a web developer , probably you have a portfolio showcasing your best creations. It’s a good idea, but recently I have stumbled upon a serious problem with online portfolios: how valuable they are in terms of displaying your work and how well they showcase what you can do? As a portfolio creator myself, I know the answer. They leave much to be desired. The design is often boring and it’s hard to follow the projects chronologically. Below I will show you an alternative to online portfolios that both solves these problems and adds additional value: top PHP development tools.