Microsoft Pro Tools Photography Software »

For all you travelers out there with a bazillion pictures from the hundreds of trips you have taken, here is a pretty cool piece of software that will allow you to Geotag your photos with ease.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools allows photographers to easily geotag photos, assign GPS coordinates, edit a picture’s meta data and lots more.  These types of functions will make it really easy to integrate your photos into Web2.0 mapping software.

There are dozens of programs out there that will do this type of thing and many of them are even open-source, but if you want a set of tools geared toward the professional photographer, this one has some powerful functionality and is priced right at $0.00.

To install Pro Photo Tools, you will need the .Net 3.0 framework in place. You can get that here.

The Best Free Web Development Software »

Everyone loves FREE. So, here is a list of some of the best free software we have found with regards to web design and development. We personally use or have used the software listed here and none of these software makers paid us to get listed here. We did it because we are just so darn nice .

Web Graphics

• Top Pick for Screen Capture Software – Faststone
• Top Pick for Screen recording software – CamStudio
• Top Pick for Graphics Editing – Gimp

Web Development

• Top Pick for FTP – Total commander
• Top Pick for Text Editor – Notepad ++ (Text editor and much more – way better than Microsoft Notepad)
• Top Pick for ActionScript editor – SEPY actionscript editor – Edit or create Actionscript without even opening Flash

Web Browsing

• Top Pick for Web Browsing – Firefox – no explanation needed
• VERY close second – Opera – Web browser that has plenty of benefits

Web Safety

• Top Pick for Anti-virus – AVG anti-virus
• Top Pick for Anti-spyware – AVG anti-spyware
• Top Pick for Anti-spyware (because you can’t have too many options in this department) – Spybot Search and Destroy

This concludes our list of the best free software related to web design. I am sure there will be some differing of opinions, so if you have ones that you are particularly fond of, feel free to speak up. As I mentioned in the introduction, we either use or have used all of the software on this list, so we recommend from experience .

Reduce Image Size Before E-mailing »

Here is a quick tip that will let Microsoft Windows automatically reduce the size of your photo before emailing it. This assumes that you don’t have any other image editing program to edit the image (Photoshop, Paint, etc.).

In order for this to work, you have to be sending the email from your computer using Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express:

1. Browse to the location where you have saved the original picture that you want to email.
2. Right-click on the image file with your mouse.
3. Select “Send To -> Mail Recipient” (See image 1).
4. In the next popup box, select “Make all my pictures smaller” (See image 2).

Depending on your default mail settings, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express will then open and your automatically compressed picture will be attached to an email ready for you to address and send.

Another great tool you could use is an online image resizer like Quickthumb. Browse your computer, upload the image, select the options to resize and “Resize it”. Super easy.

Use Graphics Correctly and your Web Site Downloads Faster »

Graphics can visually make or break a web site. For a visitor, a web page with mostly text can look an awful lot like one of those “end user license agreements” and nobody wants to look at those things . So, you need to grab your visitor’s attention and some well placed pictures can do wonders to that end.

But failing to optimize those graphics can have just as negative an impact as using no graphics at all. A graphic saved in the wrong format or one that is not compressed correctly will result in a painfully slow download time for visitors to your web site. This can cause them to lose patience and leave your site even before the Home page finishes loading. If that happens regularly, why even have a web site?

Well, here are a few tips to keep in mind when using graphics on your web pages. The purpose of these techniques is to keep the graphic file size small without compromising the quality of the finished image.

Tip #1 – Blur your .jpgs

The next time you are going to be placing .jpg files on your web page, open your photo editing or graphics program (usually Photoshop or Fireworks or maybe one of the free Photoshop alternatives we have recommended) and add a slight guassian blur to each of the images you plan on using. “Make the graphic blurry”, you say? That’s right. Now, I am obviously not talking about making the image so blurry that its visual quality is affected. No, I am saying that by adding a slight gaussian blur to a .jpg file, you will actually decrease that image’s file size. You will have to play around with the exact amount to add, but try it next time. You will be surprised at the results and the visual difference will be imperceivable.

This is an especially good trick for e-commerce web sites that display dozens of images per page. Reducing the file size of each of those images results in the total page loading faster and you thereby avoid the risk of your visitors becoming impatient and leaving.

Tip #2 – Know your .gifs

It is important to know exactly how a .gif file is compressed in order to take full advantage of this image format. A .gif file is compressed horizontally and from top to bottom. This means that a .gif image with the majority of its solid colors running horizontally will be smaller in file size than a .gif image with the majority of its solid colors running vertically. Here is an example:

Image size: 118kb	Image size: 163kb

So, if you are using .gifs on your web site, see if you can orient the image so that most of its solid colors are running horzontally.

Now, if you are only using a few small images on your web page, don’t worry about it spending the extra time on these techniques. The big payoff happens when you are using lots of graphics on your web page and you apply these techniques. In that case, you can dramatically decrease the time your visitors spend waiting while your web page is downloading.

If you have some additional tips, don’t be stingy – leave a comment below with your tip .

Free Screen Capture Software FastStone »

As our regular readers will attest to, we love FREE software . Typically posts like this are some of our most popular. And, since everyone’s wallets may be a little lighter right now, this should make some of you very happy.

I was checking out CyberNotes blog this morning and they had one post in particular that caught my eye. Ryan wrote a real nice review of his favorite screen capture sotware and the word free immediately caught my eye. If you want, check out his entire post to see the complete list but one in particular was very interesting to me.

We exclusively use SnagIt and could not work without it (earlier this month Techsmith released SnagIt version 8.2 and it is super sweet!). But in Ryan’s post, he said that FastStone was even better than SnagIt. Immediately, I thought, it could be better just on the basis that it is free and SnagIt costs $39.95. So, I followed the link and downloaded it to see for myself.

Well let me say that I am a believer. SnagIt is still a super program, but if free is your mantra, you will absolutely love FastStone. Check out just some of the features:
* Very lightweight – it will not hog up a bunch of your system resources.
* Pick a color on the screen – when you want to find out the exact color used on a website.
* Image editor – you can resize, crop and more to your heart’s content.

Check out Ryan’s post for a detailed list of the features of FastStone (and his other favorite free screen capture programs). I think we are sold on FastStone and you will be too .