I am a HUGE fan of GIMP and have used it for years. What makes me crazy is how long it takes GIMP to boot it up on my Mac (it has to use X11). I’ve used it on Windows, Linux and now Mac – and love the flexibility. What I don’t love is waiting. I hate it.

So, I went on a mission a few months back to find a smaller, faster option for simple photo editing. I tried open-source options first (of course) and even ended up buying a few apps. No luck with reaching my goal.

Then, yesterday, I’m playing with the apps available on the Chrome browser and I trip across pixlr. HoooYA!

This is one sweet little browser-based app! It’s fast, it’s amazing and …. it’s FREE! It’s also incredibly intuitive. I had polished, edited graphics saved to my desktop within 5 minutes of my first trial run. Awesome!

If you don’t want to take up space on your hard drive, and you are usually online when you need to edit photos, try editing on Pixlr. They even have code for developers to embed the editor on their own sites.

(Note: Since it’s flash-based it won’t work on iPads or iPhones, unfortunately, but it will work on ANY operating system that will run a browser. Windows/Linux/Mac lovers, rejoice!)