Getting a little bored how your photos are presented online? How about injecting some fun and humor into it. You don’t really need to be Photoshop literate to edit and add effects into your photos. There’re some really great sites out there that allows you to add effects to your photo by using their existing effect-templates.

The best part is – most of them are free and output is shown immediately on the fly. Here’s a collection of 25 Sites To Have Fun With Your Photoswe’ve come to know. You know they don’t really have to be your photos :-)

We’ll start with 10 of our favorites, followed by the rest. Full list after jump.

Our Top 10 Picks

PhotoFunia

One of the hottest site with tons of creative backgrounds to play around with. Now comes in 9 different languages.

Fun Photo Box

If you don’t get what you want from PhotoFunia, you reallly need to check out this site.

Picartia

Create a photo mosaic of your choice for free online.

Hairmixer

Choose a photo for the left and right side and start mixing their hairs up.

Photo505

We’d say, with Photo505, Photofunia and Fun Photo Box, you’ll be buzy for days.

Yearbook Yourself

Turn your face photo into yearbook alike black & white old school photo. The service is paused and will be back this Summer.

Loonapic

Make funny photos by embedding your face from the photo to the various templates.

Magmypic

Create different fake magazine covers from your photos.

Your own Wired Cover

Powered by Xerox, this service allows you to create your own Wired magazine cover. Customized everything from titles, colors to photos.

Hollywood Hair Makeover

Love those celebrities’ hair? Wear them instantly and see how you look.

More Ways To Have Fun

Write On It

Easily create your fake pictures, captions and fake magazines and other funny jokes for you and your friends.

Dumpr

Create multiple interesting effects from your normal photos.

Anymaking

Allows you to upload any photo and create "old photo", "wanted" and "puzzle" effects out of it.

Montagraph

PiZap

My Heritage

Making use of their face recognition technology, this site offers several fun effects you can play with your photos. Included are Celebrity Morph, Look-alike Meter, Celebrity Collage and Tag Photos.

Letter James

Letter James has nothing to do with photo effects, but instead you allows you to blend texts and words of your choice into their existing templates.

Imagechef

Lots of ways for you to customize your photos and express them wherever you want.

Funny Photos

Similar to Fun Photo Box and Photofunia, just different effects.

Frontpage

Make yourself frontpage in 136 different magazine covers.

Fake Magazine Cover

Personalized money

Get your head into that dollar bill.

Faceinhole

Create HDR

One of the simplest way to create HDR photos online.

Blingee

Add Glitter, Graphics, and Comments to personalize your images, then share with your friends!

Moron Face

Moronize yourself and upload your photo.

Tips submitted by: Dan.

One common obstacle on any attempt to create a IM group chat is the incompatibility of chat client used among our peers/friends; majority might be using MSN, but some have only Yahoo IM or Gtalk installed. Although there are workaround for this, but inconsistency and connectivity has always been a problem.

Here’s a web chatroom service that solves the problem – TinyChat. The typical IM chatroom requires you and your friends to share the same IM client, but with Tinychat you just need a browser – IE, Safari, Firefox or even Opera. We played with TinyChat for a while and we thought creating a group chat couldn’t get any simpler.

How TinyChat Works

To start a chatroom, just hit the "Click to Create your Chatroom" button and you are given an URL immediately. The URL serves as an invitation. With the correct URL, people can then join the chatroom you created. Isn’t it simple?

Here are some cool features we also see in TinyChat:

• Twitter tweets supported
• Chat log saving
• Able chat to website
• Supports basic emoticons

Visit TinyChat.

On any typical website, smaller images = faster loading time and lesser bandwidth consumed. It is really important to find an optimal balance between image quality and image size. Anything "un-optimized" image will parasitically suck your bandwidths and cost you a bomb if you are paying for these bandwidths (like me). If you really liked to reduce images file size and doing it the quick and easy way, I thought you should know Smush.it

Smush.it is a really useful webs service I recently came to know. It optimizes your images online, and they do it for free. Smush.it does it in 3 different ways, you can either:

• Upload a bunch of pictures in your browser, or
• Provide an URL link, or
• Do optimization on the fly on any website with Smush.it Firefox Extension or bookmarklet.

There’s also a optimization summary report comparing the before and after compression, in terms of bytes and %.

Smush your images now?

You’ve probably heard of this already, but in case you have not, here’s a really interesting site to check out. PhotoFunia takes your photo (face) and blend them nicely onto some creative templates. Here’s few samples to give you an idea how PhotoFunia transform images.

Credit: myokyawhtun

Credit: tothepc

There are tons of effects on PhotoFunia and getting your face on any of them is pretty straight forward. Select your effect, upload an image and the system will handle the rest.

Visit PhotoFunia.

Mygazines is a community website that allows its users to upload and share magazines online so you can read for free without paying. The site has a wide range of free online magazines to offers, ranging from computer magazines like MacWorld, Electronic Gaming to news and business magazines like Forbes, Discover, Wired and a lot more!

These online magazines are opened up in a flash flip-book style; you can control the flipping via mouse clicks or keyboards keys. Search within magazines are also supported, just in case you are looking for something in particular.

Check out Mygazines now.

If you are kicking back this weekend in front of your computer and got nothing interesting sites to surf, check out this site – Wordle.net. Wordle is a site that generates word clouds (similar to the tag clouds used in blogs) off any text, RSS feed, del.icio.us tag or URL you provide. The image above is an example of what I’ve got after keying the URL http://www.hongkiat.com

Wordle allows you to further customize the font, layout and color. You can even save it to a public gallery.

Turn it into a wallpaper

Generating just a text cloud sound boring, so I’ve decided to turn it into a wallpaper. Here’s how you do it, assuming you had your text cloud created.

1. Hit the Print button, save it as PDF.

   

2. Open up the PDF in Photoshop or any other similar application (make sure the resolution is 300)
3. Crop it to the the match your desktop screen size.

And there you go, a text cloud wallpaper made from the text of your site.

Thanks Efendi

Think of TinyPaste as shortURL service that turn long lengthy contents short (in format of URL) instead of URLs. This free service is simple, just paste in your text, click submit and share the URL. If you happen to paste large amount of content over IM, Twitter, etc, TinyPaste might just come in handy.

Get more efficient with TinyPaste Firefox plugin

Instead of going back to the website whenever you intend to make long contents short, try this Firefox plugin. All you need to do is just right click -> convert. It’s really that simple.

Do you have figures that you instantly want to make a comparison chart out of it? Try ChartGizmo. ChartGizmo is an online service that generates chart on the fly by talking your input into count. It’s free to use, generating charts are just a sign-up process away.

Generating charts are pretty straight forward. ChartGizmo supports 3 type of charts; bar, pie and line chart. For every chart created, you can also save them as HTML and share with your peers.

Create chart online with chartgizmo.

Fine Tuna’s service model is simple. It allows you to share an image over the Internet with your peers and friends, and on top of that, you can add your comments on the image. If you think you could use some comments while sharing images, try Fine Tuna.

This free web service allows you ways to share an image, you either upload or provide an URL to the image, add in comment and share it. If you like doing this and gonna use it often, try the bookmarklet.

I’ve came across free SMS services from time to time, but most of them either don’t work for me or the free service is only applicable to specific region only. Chawt, on the other end here, works just fine! And I have to tell you, it’s really hard to find a free online SMS sending services nowadays.

This free SMS sending services requires you to sign up, and activate the account with your cell phone. Just paste the code sent to your phone on the form, activate it and you are good to go. I’ve tested and my friends received them. The only drawbacks is the fact that every messages come attached with a line of advertisement. Well, for something free I wouldn’t complain too much.

Send SMS free with Chawt.

Thanks riotE for the heads up!

Whenever you found something interesting online and wish to share with your peers, the most direct way would be telling them the URL and which area or section to look at. With Kwout, you can share stuff more efficiently by quoting specific part of the website as image and share it. It’s all easily done with within few clicks.

Kwout is an online free service that allows you to crop, quote specific part of the website, turns it into image so you can share with anyone. Here’s all you need to do:

1. Go to kwout.com, type in the url in the textbox.
2. Scroll the area you want to share, click ‘Cut Out‘.
   

   

3. You’re done!

Do your final adjustment in terms of image width/height, borders, shadows, etc if necessary. Kwout provides 3 ways to share your quoted screenshots – post on web, post to Flickr and email to friends.

Bookmarklet to quote

There’s bookmarklet that you can place on your browser, so you don’t have to visit Kwout whenever you want to do some quoting. Check out the bookmarklets at the lower fold of the main page.

Feedjit is a free service that provides bloggers and webmaster several interesting widgets that boost interactivity among visitors and the website. Amongst are these following widgets:

• live traffic feed
• live traffic map
• live recommended readings
• live page popularity

These widgets are pretty self explanatory, and folks at Feedjit makes them really easy to get them on your website/blog sidebar. Just click on ‘Add it’, copy the script and paste them on the website. For bloggers using Typepad and Blogger platform, simply click on the icon to add. These widgets support further size and color customizations too. Pretty neat tool to show off some statistics.

While you are at it, you might want to take a look at Top 14 Free Web Statistics Tools we’ve previously wrote.

Vector Magic allows you to convert bitmap images to vector directly from their website. The process is fully automated, so for those who don’t have a Photoshop or Illustrator, converting images into vector format is not a problem now.

Vector Magic is extremely easy to use. Upload your image, select your configuration and let the system handle the rest. When it’s done, just download the vector output of your image. Click here to read more about using Vector Magic.

[Windows only] TVU Networks offers free TV service, that means with a computer running Windows (XP or 2000), you can download their Player software and watch TV shows and programs that you can only get from cable TV and satellite. TVU is free, and no registration is required, however it’s encouraged to do so.

TVU Networks Channels

TVU covers too many channels to be listed here. If you just check out the channel page, they guys covers more programs that you can imagine; from news to sports, musics, lifestyle, networks, cartoons, etc. There’s even a chinese network too. That means you can watch channels like Star TV, CCTV, Phoenix Movie, TVBS, ETTV Entertainment News and more. Oh did I also mentioned you can watch Euro Cup 2008 live?

Getting Started

All you need is just the player (download here), install and off you go. Do check with the system requirements though.

System Requirements:

1) Broadband Internet service (cable or DSL)

2) Windows 2000, XP or Vista

3) Windows Media Player (version 9+)

4) Microsoft IE (version 6+)

PageOnce the free web service that allows you to store all your online accounts under one roof, so you can access them within one page is now on public beta. That means you don’t really need an invitation, simply go to the website and sign up an account and you are good to go.

Click here to sign up a PageOnce account.

These guys quoted my lines as testimonial too. Nice.

I’m not sure how many places they are searching from, but Google Image is one, that’s for sure. If you want to find photo of someone via the Internet, you can try your luck at facesaerch.com. The site has a very simple interface and it only serve one purpose – finding photos for you. It might not be the most accurate, I tried searching for few friends and on most attempts the photos did appear, even though sometimes they don’t appear first in the results.

Notice facesaerch was wrongly spelt, but that’s not a typo.

We bet you’ve use the Alexa to compare the traffic among few sites. Feedcompare is another web service that does the same; but instead of comparing web traffics, it compares Feedburner feed subscriber counts. Feedcompares supports comparison up to 4 websites/blogs and you can generate a chart as far as 24 months view. This is not rocket science but these guys have manage to put in few other functions to make the comparison really interesting.

Comparison on any timeframe

When you move the mouse horinzontaly on the generated chart, you are able to see all site’s total subscribers over time. It makes it great to compare the number of subscribers at any timeframe.

Share the comparison

Not only you can compare subscriber numbers of various sites, Feedcompare allows sharing by generating a dedicated link for each comparison you do.

When we want to share files online with our peers, we often come to think of online services like Megaupload, Rapidshare, etc. These services are great, but often they too have their limitations. For instance, some host impose limits to countries. Here’s where services like UploadJockey comes to play its role. Whenever you upload a file to UploadJockey, it will upload your file to multiple free file hosting services (Rapidshare.com, Badango.com, Sendspace.com, Zshare.net, Megaupload.com and Depositfiles.com). For those who downloads, they get to choose which host they prefer. Think of it as a service that mass mirroring the files you intended to share.

UploadJockey is free to use, but comes with a limitation of 100Mb per upload. Uploading files to UploadJockey is easy. Just browse to your file, upload it and you’ll be returned a link to a page with download links from different hosts. Just be careful what you’ve click because there’s quite a number of ads on the upper fold of the page.

Aside from that, UploadJockey also gives you some revenue for sharing files. Click here to learn more.

This week’s giveaway is something graphic designer and web designer will like. Personally, I’ve been playing with it for weeks and it had inspired me to redo part of my blog’s design again. Anyway here’s the tool – ColorSchemer. Designers at work, you gotta have this on the desktop. It’s a color picker, color suggester, photo color tracer, color mixer, analyzer and more. Let me just bring out some of the cool features embedded in this color tool.

Color Picker

There’s no need to screen capture, open the image in Photoshop and trace with Eyedropper tool whenever you need to find out any color code. ColorSchemer’s color picker allows you trace colors on the fly. And with the keyboard shortcut built-in, tracing any color is within milliseconds.

Color Views

ColorSchemer comes with 2 good different color views, the color wheel and harmonies views. These all comes in handy when you are in the mood of doing color matching. All you need to do is select the colors you like from the wheel or harmonies and ColorSchemer will does the rest. If you think your selection of colors match well, save them as template for future references.

Color Suggesting

You have a base color for the design but cracking your head getting some alternatives to go with it? Colorpick your base color with ColorSchemer, and you’ll be prompt with 4 matching colors. It might not be the final choices, but at least a good jump start.

Photo Schemer

When you drag an image into Photo Schemer, it will attempt to trace the color combination, giving you X number of matching colors. This comes in handy when you want to designer something similar any sample, but want to avoid using the same colors.

Color Schemer is one of the cool color tool I’ve mentioned earlier in the blog. It make life easier as a designer, especially when it comes to color mix-and-match.

How to win?

ColorSchemer cost $49.99 per copy, but I’m giving out 2 copies (1 Windows version, 1 Mac) for hongkiat.com readers. Here’s how you grab it.

1. Look for the hyperlink inside RSS feed (end of content, before Related Articles)
2. Click on it, send us your name and email address.

For the first 2 that does that, we’ll be sending each a copy of ColorSchemer Studio your way.

Prizes claimed.

Sorry guys, both copies had been claimed. Congrats to Moses Hoyt and Jeanne J Farrell

• 10:04PM – Moses Hoyt (mac)
• 10:39PM – Mary A. Malinconico (mac)
• 10:40PM – Jeanne J Farrell (Win)
• 10.44PM – Selina Ooi (Win)
• 10.58PM – Neil MacLean (Mac)
• Closed.

We use URL shortening services on daily basis, they are extremely useful in Internet conversations, let it forum threads, IM chats, etc. These services are also life-savers in communication channel where you are limited to specific no. of characters per session – Twitter for instance. Some even use them to hide away affiliate links they shared or bypass firewalls that block websites according to URLs.

As long as they turn your long whining URL short, it’s a good job. TinyURL is perhaps the famous amongst, but it’s cool to know more so we get to swap from one to another (if you ever get bored). Here we’ve compiled 68 URL shortening services on the Internet that’s still working. Why the ‘still working‘? Some services were forced to shut down thanks to spammers. Together with the list, we thought you might also want a list of bookmarklet-supported URL Shortening services in a Firefox bookmark file so you can shorten any URL on the fly with Firefox. Everything after jump.

68 URL Shorteners

We believe this isn’t close to a complete list. If you got more, we appreciate a heads up.

Bookmarklets for Firefox

[Firefox only] We compiled all URL shorterning services that supports bookmarklet into a bookmark file so you don’t have to. Download shortcut.html (right-click, save as), import it into your Firefox browser as bookmark and start to shorten any URL with any services that serve your mood on the fly. For those who are not familiar with Firefox bookmark importing, here’s a small guide.

How to import for Firefox?

Step 1

Download shortcut.html. In Firefox, go to Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks.

Step 2

In Bookmark Manager, go to File Import. Select ‘From File’, look for shortcut.html and click Ok.

List of URL shorterners should appear as a folder under your Bookmark Toolbar. If it does not, most probably is because you did not enabled Bookmark Toolbar on Firefox.