Picasa starts to work as soon as it is installed and provides very easy cataloguing of images on your local PC, particularly valuable these days. A beautifully designed interface includes a range of excellent image editing tools, turning poor pictures into good ones at a click of the mouse. Publishing or sharing a collection is just a few clicks and you don't even need any web space. Similarly, images can be sent to a Blogger web log or e-mailed with resizing performed automatically.

http://picasa.google.com

This is extraordinary. One small download and then you simply type the name of an artist and their tracks start playing! Build your own albums or playlists or just listen to a 'radio' playing the type of music you prefer. Occasional ads for their service but otherwise no interruptions.

A free online tool that let’s its users mix photos, videos, music and digital effects together to create new videos or presentations. These ‘Mashes’ can then be shared online via email, social networks or embedded in blogs. Best of all Masher includes lots of video and music content from the BBC and other key providers.
For teachers and schools it can be used as great teaching enhancement, allowing students the opportunity the create their own Mashes related to their course topics and then present these to their classmates or teachers.

review needed

Use this amazing tool to find images with a certain colour (notice how they sensibly covered US and UK interests in the name!) At first thought it may seem a little odd but when you see the results you will see how useful it can be.

An image editor that fits on an old floppy disk. A programme that just opens, not thinks, whirrs and covers your desktop with toolbars galore. When all you want to do is paste in that screenshot and crop a bit of it, this is easily the quickest solution. And it's free.

http://www.irfanview.com

Make screen casts from ypour monitor. Record a series of actions and publish them. The site features examples, including, at the time of writing, some on using Google docs in e-learning!

Review needed

The interface still leaves a bit to be desired and needs some design input but, boy, the results are impressive! Smarter than Picasa and many reputable and expensive album-maker add-ons to commercial products.

http://jalbum.net

Here's a lovely application you can just draw, paint, doodle, spray with. It's what we always wanted MSPaint to be and more. Work can be saved in a range of formats for use elsewhere and it will suit all ages and levels of artistic prowess! There is a free starter edition.

www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html

Excellent animation studio with wide range of characters, backgrounds and tools to help you create your own movie or frame.

Wide range of performances contributed to this Open Source library which permits you to use any of the content in class. Search by Composer, performer, Instrument or Style. You can get the sheet music here too!

Review needed

This is fun! You can create an animated avatar which speaks in your voice. A nice way to include intros or explanations with on-line materials. Nice interface. You need a microphone, although I believe it can also speak from typed text.

Review needed

Another of many photo sharing sites that have appeared over the years. This one's still free, though and with plenty of room and some interesting touches.

Old-fashioned looking site could do with a bit of work but interesting applications available there with good reviews. Wink does the record your screen movements job well.

There are several on-line album providers around but many have limits. Bubbleshare doesn't, which is quite surprising, so that's a good place to keep copies of all those photos for a start. There's a simple tool to include a small visual display of an album on a wiki or VLE page which will be popular.

At last, some basic Photoshop tools for everyone to use, free, on-line. Smart interface. Upload your photos, arrange them in albums or just edit them and download the new file.

https://www.photoshop.com/express

Vista users may struggle with lots of things that don't seem to do what they did in XP, like work, but they have had a rather nice image gallery, showing that the MediaPlayer team's design sense is having some influence too. This is now available free for XP users and is a simple download. Compares favourably to Picasa which is saying something.

Like Flickr but without the monthly upload limit. In some respects you may find it easier to use with a delightfully clean interface and you can change the colours, by the way, so the pink flower is optional.

reviews needed

Microsoft's PhotoSynth takes your images and detects common features, depth of field etc then creates a visually fascinating animation from them. By using several shots at different angles of a place or item the effect can be quite stunning.

reviews needed

If you want to present images in a stylish way to grab attention and also add a soundtrack then forget PowerPoint and try this instead. Vert quick, easy and effective. Basically the application does everything and delivers a file for you to share or use.

reviews needed

Yugma is a free web collaboration service that enables people to instantly connect over the internet to communicate and share content and ideas using any application or software. Whether you are on a Mac or a PC, you can connect on-demand and real-time with friends, family, clients, or employees whether they are across the city, nation or even the globe.

http://www.yugma.com

With links to Flickr, Facebook, MySpace etc., this application makes editing photos on-line very simple. Lots of very cool instant effects and pre-sets make it a big hit with those who can't wait!

An online image editor (not Photoshop, but free!). You upload your images and edit using a pretty good collection of tools (rotate, resize, crop, convert to sepia, negate colours, adjust colours, remove noise, sharpen and other special effects).

http://www.phixr.com

Dfilm is a fascinating tool to create movies online using Flash components. Simplistic in many respects but could prove useful (and would give students some fun creating!). The end result of your movie is emailed to you.

http://www.dfilm.com/

Stuck for a way to get your message across? here's something completely different! Strip Creator allows you to create comic books, and again is a lot of fun to use and may appeal as another way to present some information.Some samples here too.

http://www.stripcreator.com/

A great cartoon-maker site, similar to stripcreator, but with different characters.

This has been around for a while, once a special offer for those who validated their Microsoft software but now pretty freely available. Wraps pictures, text and a soundtrack in a nice package that brings delivery to life and creates interest. Big files and a bit clunk but simpler than Moviemaker. Splashcast better.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/
digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx

Create online albums of images to share with students, staff and wider, or for research storage. Tag pictures for easy sorting and retrieval. Flicker provides an immense library of images to explore.

http://flickr.com/

Take video, images, some text and add some music. Drag and drop the files into this remarkable application and it produces a professional show, host it for you and all you need to do is make a note of the address.

http://web.splashcast.net/console/

"Rick Prelinger and The Internet Archive hereby offer these public domain films from Prelinger Archives to all for free downloading and reuse. You are warmly encouraged to download, use and reproduce these films in whole or in part, in any medium or market throughout the world. You are also warmly encouraged to share, exchange, redistribute, transfer and copy these films, and especially encouraged to do so for free." So that's OK, then. Have look. Use them.

http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Elegant in its simplicity, Jing's minimal feature set keeps the focus on instant sharing. We think it's the perfect companion to the casual, fast-paced online conversations we all have every day. Take screen prints, add comments, send a link to the image, add a commentary.

Review needed

This is probably on of the best tools for recording on-screen activity and turning it into a video that can be shared easily and which can look very professional. It is frequently used by software promoters themselves (including for information about Jing above). It is only a 30 day trial but you could do a lot in that time so I feel it should be included as it is so good.

late addition - haven't tried this out yet but it looks really useful, recording your movements in using an application which can then be used in future training sessions whilst you have a coffee. 

http://www.camstudio.org

Their printscreen application can make that screen capture business a whole lot simpler, taking care of size of image, area required and extras to save you the trouble.

http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/

Simple little tool that will read text and save it as an mp3 file. Cool. Lots of features like different voices etc.

http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems and goes down great at staff development events

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Add an image gallery to your web log, VLE page or web site with this simple-to-use tool. Fun effects and templates available.

http://www.slide.com

ZCubes claims to be 'the world's first website that seamlessly integrates browsing, searching, editing, painting, freehand drawing, cursive hand-writing, audio-video media management, publishing, and much more into a pure browser-based platform'.

ZCubes handles over 30 file-formats. Work, play, research, create, think, browse, organise, and have fun with this. Loaded with an incredible 300+ features, your creativity may be your only limitation!

http://home.zcubes.com/AboutZCubes.htm