Ready to communicate visually with new cool tools and web services? Here's my visual communication and video publishing toolkit for this week. This time I have selected for you some really nifty tools to edit any of your digital pictures online, as well as services to search and create slideshows with maximum ease. Check it out!

Photo credit: RGB Space

Here my selected visual communication and video publishing tools for this week:

1. Aviary: Free web-based suite of image editing software

2. FotoGlif: Upload your pictures, share them with albums, and get 50% of ad-revenue
3. Vector Magic: Online image editing software lets you de-pixelize your images, making them resizable with no quality loss
4. GoldMail: Online service for creating narrated slideshows starting from images, videos or documents
5. Colour Contrast Check: Specify a background and a foreground color, and determine how their contrast looks
6. PicURLs: Web-site that aggregates images from social networking sites, that you can preview and download for free
7. YouTube Batch Downloader: Browse through YouTube videos and get them downloaded with one click
8. TimeTube: Make a research and create timelines with YouTube videos

Visual Communication Tools

1. Aviary
   
   Aviary is a web-based suite of image editing software, that you can use to edit all of your pictures without having no software installed on your machine. You can edit and resize pictures, create color schemes, edit vectors, apply effects, create fonts, and more. Currently in private beta it is free to use after someone invites you or you get accepted in the beta.
   http://a.viary.com/






2. FotoGlif
   
   FotoGlif is a photo sharing site that allows you to upload an unlimited number of picture and share them through photo albums. After you register and login, you can upload all of your pictures from the control panel, arrange them in albums and embed your albums on your blog or website: you will be given the 50% of the ad-revenue share from FotoGlif. Free to use, registration needed.
   http://fotoglif.com/

   
   
   
   

3. Vector Magic
   
   Vector Magic is an image editing software that lets you de-pixelize your images, turning them into vectors. You can upload any image without any registration, select the vectorizing method between three different qualities and, after it is processed, you can download the EPS, SVG, or PNG, and resize it to any size you want since it won't lose quality anymore. Free to use and completely web-based.
   http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/






4. GoldMail
   
   Goldmail is a new service for creating narrated slide shows. To create a presentation in Goldmail, first you grab your images, either from your hard disk, by taking screen grabs, or by creating text slides in Goldmail, you sort them in the order you want. Then you press Record, and while you're talking, click the "next slide" button to advance the show (you can also use an audio file from your PC). Free to use.
   http://www.goldmail.com/






5. Colour Contrast Check
   
   Colour Contrast Check Tool allows you to specify a foreground and a background colour and determine how good or bad they contrast among themselves. You can use three simple RGB sliders to select your colors, or simple provide the HTML code. Then, it will automatically tell you the brightness and color difference, telling you whether they are legible together or not. Free.
   http://www.snook.ca/...






6. PicURLs
   
   PicURLs is a site that aggregates the most popular pictures from a variety of social networking/bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, etc.). Each picture is thumbnailed with a quick link to the originating site and article, and you can preview it on PicURLs after you are redirected on the original site for downloading it. Free.
   http://picurls.com/

Video Publishing Tools

1. YouTube Batch Downloader
   
   YouTube Batch Downloader is a Windows-based YouTube browser application which also lets you download and convert videos. You can research and watch videos, browse playlists and users profile and, when you have found one or more videos that you want to grab, just decide a video format (wmv, mov, mp4, mpg, flv, and more), click a button and get all those video batch downloaded to your selected folder. Free to download and use.
   http://eurekr.com/download.html

   
   
   
   

2. TimeTube
   
   TimeTube is a timeline creator which collects videos from YouTube and arranges them in a year-based timeline. After you arrive on the site, all you need to do is to type a keyword in the search box, press Build, and wait until TimeTube collects all the videos related to that term and arranges them on a timeline in chronological order, so that you can browse through them easily. Free to use.
   http://www.dipity.com/mashups/timetube

Originally written by Nico Canali De Rossi for Master New Media and first published on June 1st 2008 as "Visual Communication And Video Publishing - Selected Tools And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic Jun01 08"