For long I had been a “self-proclaimed” photo enthusiast. Although capturing photographs were just attempts to freeze time on those moments which I wanted to take along with me for the rest of my life, I had been attempting to put them online from the very beginning. I’ve seen the launch of Picasa as just a desktop application and flickr in its formative years as a non-yahoo entity. Over the dozens of other attempts to go online such as the Kodak Gallery , Web Shots and Yahoo Photos , Picasa Web stood out simply for its ability to provide a 1GB space, through its infinitely expanding storage at Google.

But one of the factors which stood out on all these attempts was that, in every one of them, the photo editing had to be done “outside the web” and had to be uploaded later. As the needs of the internet grew, more blogs and social networks started demanding faster and user-friendly ways of “manipulating” photographs, once they have been uploaded. And this had to happen as soon as possible.

Adobe Photoshop Express , the little I’ve tried so far, has been extremely impressive in its attempt to provide user with an “online application” (non-OS specific) to edit photos once uploaded. It can, perhaps, be seen as a rather toned down version of the Photoshop CS3. With the 2GB space that it offers for free, the amount of editing features that it has already incorporated, looks like a promising step forward. And I’m happy with the little that I get to play around with the pictures for now 🙂

Gone are the days when, the grandeur with which Microsoft attempts to “prelaunch” its products is anticipated with a lot of interest. But I must admit that the idea of Photosynth , seems promising if it actually makes it to a common internet user, although the preview being restricted to just XP and Vista users can be annoying to “8% of the population” who use Mac OSX and of course the open source community in general 🙂 .