The open Web has no good way to edit images. There are tools like Picnic, Sumo, and Aviary, but they all revolve around proprietary tools and destination sites. Making graphical edits is a fundamental action that should be available anywhere you see an image on the web.

Using Ubiquity as a platform for innovation, here is what an browser-based image editor might look like:

How You Use It

(1) Place your mouse over an image, or select it.

(2) Bring up Ubiquity and use the “edit” command. Alternatively, right-click to get a context menu or use the to-be-implemented mouse-based version of Ubiquity. This brings up the full-screen editor.

(3) The full-screen editor has four major areas arranged along the top: reshape, develop, effects, and done. Reshape gives you the basics of resizing, cropping, and rotating the image.

Develop let’s you fiddle with the contrast, hue, saturation, color curves, etc. Effects are for turning a photo into a reprise of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The sub-actions take place down the right-side of the screen in a non-modal way, and are dependent on which of the four top actions has been selected. The interface takes some inspiration from Adobe Lightroom.

(4) When you are done editing a photo the tricky part begins. Most pages aren’t read-write (although, in the original web browsers of yesteryear they were). To “save” we are going to have to do something clever.

We can put the image back into the page, by replacing the image with the new one as encoded by a data URL. From there, you can right-click to save it or, if it is in an email, just send it off. The browser can even annotate the page locally so that when you browse back to the same page, you see your modifications, just like the “edit-page” command does in Ubiquity now. Of course, those changes won’t be shown to the rest of the world.

The other options, besides simply downloading it to your computer, is to save it by sharing it via social networking sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, or Flickr. Flickr currently accepts POST requests for uploading modified images. Hopefully, as time goes on and image manipulations becomes a more integrated part of the web, more and more sites will think of their content as user-mutable.

Using Open Web Technology

As the prolific Jacob Seidelin has shown, canvas is able to support a full range of photo-editing capabilities. You can see some of those capabilities in action with his canvas-based library Pixastic.

Jacob will begin leading work on a Ubiquity-based editor in around a month. I’m super excited to see where it goes. We’ll keep you posted.

If anyone else wants to get involved, join us.