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Has this ever happened to you? You've got a digital photo that you really love, except for that thing you need to take out of it. It could be anything from the bars on the cage at the zoo that get in the way of that cute Panda cub, to that great picture of you that just happens to have your Ex in it. If only you could get rid of that extra stuff.

This may be a job for PhotoWipe. Just drag your image into the app and paint the stuff you want to get rid of with black. Black? Yep, and then click the Preview button, and the sections you over-painted will automagically go away and be replaced with a reasonable facsimile of what the picture might look like without them. Through some behind-the-scenes sleight-of-hand, the app looks at the area of the picture around where you applied the paint and makes a guess as to what it might have looked like originally. Your results may vary, of course, and apparently you'll have better luck with long, narrow regions–like those zoo cage bars–than with bigger areas (Mr. or Ms. Wrong), but either way, you've improved the overall appearance of your image.

PhotoWipe is a free Windows application.

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Not everything you do on your computer has to be serious. Sure, you've got spreadsheets and reports to work on and all that, but sometimes it's nice to just kick back and have a little fun. So how long has it been since you had a new cursor?

Cursor Editor lets you create a whole pile of new cursors. You can make them plain or fancy, static or animated, and more. Import images or draw them yourself, whichever you prefer. Build a whole set so that you've covered not only "normal", but also all the various resize, move, and busy cursors as well. And once you get one you really like, you can share it with the world as part of the publisher's free online library.

A free download, Cursor Editor is a Windows application. You should be able to use with on systems running Win2k and later.

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Windows Metafiles (WMF) are an image format that lets you easily incorporate pictures into Word, Excel, and other apps that support that format. There aren't lots of tools out there, however, that let you view those files without embedding them into a document or spreadsheet first. That's not too handy.

WMF Viewer is the exception to this. With this tool you can open WMF files and see what's inside of them before you start sticking them in your documents. It's compatible with standard 16-bit files, and also the newer 32-bit Enhanced Metafiles (EMF). You can open multiple files at once, and once you're in there, it's easy to zoom, scale, align, and more. You can even print them out if you want to.

WMF Viewer is a free download. It's a Windows app and runs under any Win32 system, so you should be able to use it with anybody from Win95 up through Windows 7.

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If you've got a bunch of images to tweak, you don't want to have to do them one at a time. Opening a few—or several dozen—pictures to add a watermark or a border could be a serious pain in the neck. It's good to have tools out there that can handle a bunch of files at once.

Check out FastStone Photo Resizer. While you can use it in single-file mode, it also supports bulk processing as well. If you need to tweak color settings or resize a bunch of images, it's pretty easy. You can rename photos and other images a well, maybe adding a sequential number to each file, making it easier to sort them. In addition, it will do bulk conversions as well, so you can with one tool convert your JPEG images to PNG files and resize them to upload to your blog, without taking all day to get the job done.

A Windows application, FastStone Photo Resizer is free for home users.

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Tweaking pictures one at a time is a pain in the neck. A camera full of digital images takes up a ton of space, and would take forever to load if you were to put them on a website or blog. Shrinking them down into something more manageable will save space, and makes it easier for everybody who views your handiwork online to see it quicker and get on with their day.

Resizing images is easy with Shrink O'Matic. Just drag and drop your picture files onto the application, or browse for them on your hard drive. It works equally well with JPEG, GIF, and PNG images. Choose a maximum height or width for your tweaked pictures, and then save them in their original format, or convert them into one of the other supported image types.

Shrink O'Matic runs on the Adobe Air platform. That means that it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux machines—any system that supports Air. That's handy, since you can use the same tool on all of your machines.

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Digital cameras are pretty slick. For many folks, you can take more, better pictures than you can with an old-school camera with film. And since there's no consumable film involved, there's really no incremental cost between taking a dozen photos and taking a zillion of them. They're pretty versatile, also, since you can use your digital images on your website, blog, or even email them to grandma—although with the big file sizes involved, that last one can be a problem.

There are plenty of tools out there that you can use to tweak your pictures so that they aren't so big, letting you share them more easily, whether as an attachment to an email or a picture on a website. If you're looking for such a tool, you might want to take a look at VSO Image Resizer. As the name suggests, this app lets you resize your pictures, but you can also do more. Change the resolution of your images, compress them, do bulk renaming, or even add a watermark. It's compatible with most image formats, and it even knows about RAW formats for several digital camera manufacturers.

VSO Image Resizer is free for personal use. You can use it on Windows systems running Win2000 and later.

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Whether you're laying out a new web page, or writing a new desktop app, it's important that your screens be laid out just so. Or maybe you're tweaking an image file or two and want to get them just the right size. If you were doing this on your desktop in the real world with an X-acto and rubber cement, you'd be using a ruler. Well, you can do the same thing on your electronic desktop as well.

Pixel Ruler is a free tool that lets you measure precise sizes and placement on your screen. It's a floating ruler that you can drag around the screen to measure sizes of things or distances between objects. It works both horizontally and vertically, and can be stretched out to 1300 pixels in length.

A free download, Pixel Ruler is a Windows application. It's compatible with systems running Windows 98/NT and later.

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If you handle a lot of electronic images, then you may spend a fair amount of time resizing them. Whether you're posting to a blog, sharing them on Flickr, or emailing them to friends, you've got a size in mind, and those pictures aren't going to resize themselves.

Dropresize is a handy tool that you can use to adjust the size of your images. It sits in the System Tray keeping an eye on a dropbox folder you've set up; once you drag an image file into the dropbox, it springs into action. You can configure it ahead of time by defining a height or width that you want for your finished images—it keeps the proportions in mind, so they don't get all distorted. Choose a maximum size for a given dimension, with a maximum of 1600 pixels, as well as a quality setting—after all, it doesn't do any good to resize an image that looks so nasty that nobody can recognize Uncle Frank in the picture anyway. It currently only works with JPEG images, but they're working on adding new file formats to that sometime in the near future.

Dropresize is a Windows application. It runs under XP, Vista, and 7, and requires version 2.0 of the .NET Framework.

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Taking screenshots of web pages is a way of life. Maybe you've created a new page or site and need to show it to a client. Maybe you're documenting your work and want to grab a whole page to stick onto a report. Either way, it's not easy to capture a whole page. Use your machine's standard screen print functionality, and you're going to grab the visible portion of the web page at best, but if your page is longer than that, you're pretty much out of luck. Or you can save your screen as a PDF, but now you've taken one continuous screen and stuffed it into a multiple-page document. That's not really what you had in mind either.

WebShot lets you capture the whole page—not just the visible portion—into a single file—no multiple pages here. If your page is 2500 pixels tall, for example, then your screenshot file is going to be 2500 pixels tall. You get the whole page with none of the traditional limitations. You can save into several different image file formats, so you can use your pretty pictures however you want.

WebShot is a Windows app. It runs under Windows 2000 or later. You'll also need the most recent version of Internet Explorer to make things work right.

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Lots of systems now ship with a webcam as standard equipment. It's pretty handy to be able to video conference from the convenience of your desktop. For that matter, there are lots of uses for that technology. Unfortunately, if you're using more than one of them at a time, you may be out of luck as far as your camera is concerned.

ManyCam lets you use your webcam with multiple applications at the same time. Whether you're chatting or streaming live, your single camera handles it all. In addition, ManyCam includes several fun features you can use, including adding text, including local date and time, to your video feed, and background effects. It's almost like having your own green screen backgrounds, but without all that tedious painting.

ManyCam is a free download. It's available for Windows (requires Win2k or later) and Mac (OS X 10.5+, Intel machines only).

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