Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If you’re looking for an image management solution for your WordPress blog, you may want to give NEXTGen by Alex Rabe a try. It features sortable albums, watermark function, support for popular image effects, multiple CSS stylesheets, slideshow and a sidebar widget. Here’s a live view of this image gallery plugin.

Create a color palette from any picture with Pictaculous. It creates a color palette from your image (5 swatches) and also offers ten suggestions for color themes to go with the image. You can then download the palettes as an Adobe swatch file, or e-mail it to yourself. You can also use the service from your cell phone.

We’ve tried Pictaculous with a photo taken on PhotoBooth – see results below:

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality. Optimizing images for the web will drastically cut down page loading time.

After Smush.it runs on a web page it reports how many bytes would be saved by optimizing the page’s images and provides a downloadable zip file with the minimized image files. Smush.it is part of YSlow Firefox add-on and can be downloaded here.

Create your own AJAX loading gif with this free generator at WebscriptLab. Choose from over 30 different designs, background, main color and speed.

The free banner designer tool at EarnMoneyOnlineHub works quite well. It’s a great tool if you need a simple banner on the fly and don’t want to fire up your graphics program. You can choose different sizes, customize font and font color, background, border, apply effects and then save the whole design in different formats.

Vector graphics are a designer’s best friend, especially when they are free and of good quality like the ones at OpenGraphicDesign. The designs on this site look ultra clean and modern and are free for downloading. The site also offers other free graphics, backgrounds and templates. The work on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons license.

Download the following and more at OpenGraphicDesign:

If your collection of stock photos needs some new additions, visit FreeDigitalPhotos. They offer thousands of free and royalty free photos for corporate and personal use. Every image is free, with an option to buy high resolution versions for use in print or graphic design.

Create a jigsaw puzzle from your own image and send to others or put it on your website with JigsawPlanet. To add a puzzle to your website, upload your image, create the puzzle and copy and paste the code. This program works very well and the puzzle pieces move smoothly. You can try it and test it with the pre-made puzzles on the site.

Batch processing of images and manually renaming Exifs (Exchangeable Image File format is an image file format used by digital cameras) is a very time consuming task. Phatch is a free tool for processing batches of images and renaming Exifs. It’s open source and works on Linux, Mac Os X and Windows for all popular image formats. Phatch can batch resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually.

One of the best image gallery plugins we’ve seen – the NextGen – Gallery plugin – can by downloaded at AlexRabe’s blog. This image plugin, which is distributed under the GNU General Public License is very versatile and offers:

- Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of images
- Upload a Zip-File with pictures : Upload pictures in a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
- Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
- JavaScript Effect: Use any available popular image effect : Thickbox, Greybox or Lightbox
- Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
- Slideshow: Full integrated flash slideshow
- Sidebar Widget : Show a random picture at your sidebar