SnagIt: Quick and Easy Editing of your Photos

So I am at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, and I needed to write some quick posts to one of my blogs. This time I wanted to add some pictures that I shot with my cell phone -a Motorola Droid 2-to my blog. I knew the pics I take with my phone are usually quite large, (about 1 to 1.5 MB) and they would weigh down my blog. I have used Photoshop occasionally for the past ten years or so but did not have the program on my laptop with me this time.  So why not download one of the many free photo editing programs online, good enough to make some small basic changes to my pictures but not so good that it will take me a long time to learn them.

So I googled “free online image editing software reviews” and came upon some reviews by CNET in the first ten Google search results http://download.cnet.com/windows/image-editing-software/. Based on editors and users reviews I selected three programs that looked good to me: SnagIt (version 10), PhotoScape and FastStone Image Viewer, and I decided on SnagIt. Why SnagIt? Because it was highest on the review list and because the Owner, Techsmith, also makes another software i bought from them (Camtasia screen recording and editing software), it was as simple as that.

Having used PhotoShop it was quite easy to find the few basic functions I wanted to use on the images I shot with my cell phone today: resizing, cropping, zooming out and saving in different file formats. SnagIt 10 uses graphics icons to represent the functions on their menu and they looked pretty intuitive to me. It probably took me about 10 minutes to play with and figure out those four functions. Sure, if I had not used Photoshop or another image editor before it would have taken a lot longer. All together with finding the program and downloading and installing it (which went pretty smooth) it took me about 20 to 30 minutes of “new tool install and learning time“, before getting down to the task of writing and editing my blog and adding my newly edited photos. Hurray.

By the way it turned out that SnagIt is not really free, it costs $49 but you can get a 30 day free trial first. Which is still kind of free for now. 🙂