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Collage making software (aka Don't use Fotojet)

I don't usually get particularly bothered about spam, but there are times when it's necessary to make a bit of a stand. I wrote about the Fotojet collage software in September last year. Since then I have had requests to review it on April 29th, 11th May, 11th May (yes, twice in one day) and on the 16th May. Each request was exactly the same, but apparently written by different people such as Angela and Sophia. I was polite and told them that I've reviewed their product (positively as well) and asked them to stop mailing me. However, that appeal fell on deaf ears. The last time they did it, I said that I'd blog, so this is it.

PearlMountain Technology clearly has no idea how to run a sensible, coherent or effective media marketing campaign. They seem to be under the impression that what works best is to simply throw out the same marketing email time and time again, in the hope that at some point it's going to stick. They are clearly too stupid to keep a note of who they send their spam emails to, thus resulting in repeated mailings or they simply don't care. 

I've deleted my positive review of the product. Instead, if you're looking for collage software, I would suggest that you try one of these excellent products instead, which are as good, if not better than Fotojet, and at the very least they don't continually spam reviewers.

Befunky

Fotor

Glogster

Mixbook

Photocollage

Photovisi

Photomontager

Photovideo Collage

PicMonkey

Postermywall

Ribbet!

There are of course plenty of others, but this is a nice quick roundup.

Pablo for social media friendly images

There are plenty of photographic tools out there to help you create images, and Pablo is very similar to them. However it does allow you to quickly create tall, square or wide images for use in particular networks such as Twitter or Facebook. Choose or upload your image, add your content and save it. Simples!

Quickly create social media images

If you're having difficulties creating images, then give Pablo by Buffer a go. It's a really simple product - you get a series of backgrounds, or you can provide your own, quotes - or you can provide your own. You can have blurred backgrounds with or without contrast and in colour or black and white. You can then choose to have the image made available in square, tall, wide etc for different social media backgrounds. Nice and easy, and though it's simple it's great to knock something up in under a minute. 

Make collages for free

... with FotoJet. It's a nice simple product that does the job well. You can go for traditional collages in the block format and they have a lot of different formats. Alternatively you can go for some of the fun modern things, putting your face into the Mona Lisa, Christmas scenes, comics, Facebook posts and so on. It's all done online and is nice and simple. Worth giving it a go!

Meme creation tools

You'll have seen these, even if you're not sure of what they're called. Images which have a snappy/funny/sarcastic/etc comment on them which get shared around the internet. Pronounced as 'meem', not 'me-me' in case you were wondering. If you want to create your own there are a few places that you can try. I'd start with the Meme Generator which has thousands of images for you to choose from - people, celebrities, items and so on. Just add in your caption above and below and save it. Simple as you like. It's a bit annoying though that you can only do captions at top and bottom, and you've got a limited amount of space - if you write too much your font size just gets smaller and smaller. Here's an example that I created:

Another good choice is Memesly which works in the same way, but has a different set of images that you can play with. However, the search function was much poorer, so I had to take pretty much what I could get. This is my attempt:

A great image converter

There are plenty of image converters out there, but Convert-my-image.com (link) is a really good one, You can take a .jpg and convert it into a PDF file, but also plenty of others, such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIF, TIFF, and WMF. You can change the settings to do things such as changing the margins, the orientation of the page, the size of the image and you can also rotate the image angle as well.

I tried it out myself, and it’s lightening fast. The resulting PDF file was then automatically downloaded back onto my computer. I really liked the presentation and quality of the conversion. The Convert-my-image website also has a variety of other tools as well, such as converting a set of images and pictures into PDF as a batch process. You can also convert PDF to JPG online (with no limits on the document size), and you can crop photographs or images online (no need to download or install any software).

I really liked the tool that lets you turn an image into an icon of either 16x16 or 32x32 (as well as 10 other formats); that was great fun, and it even worked on a photograph of me, which I thought was
very impressive.

All told, it’s a great resource – fast, easy and effective, and best of all, it’s completely free to use.

The screenshot below shows the menu for taking an image and turning it into a variety of other formats, including icons. 

Create Posters!

Bored with the usual posters? Try taking a look at PosterMyWall, which is a really nice program. Simply create posters quickly and easily, or use their category approach and edit something that has already been created. Very straight forward - and when you have created it you can share it across social media or download it. That's the only bit I'm not so keen on - it's a basic file size and has a watermark - if you don't want that, you have to pay to get a better version. Nonetheless, it's worth a look at. Here's one that I did, based on something that they had already produced:

Add text to your images quickly and easily

Need to caption your work? Try Pinwords which takes the fuss out of it. Simply upload your image, add in the text with various different options and save it straight to Pinterest. It's ok as far as it goes, but it is somewhat limited on what you can do. This is the one that I did - it look about a minute.

Create great images quickly and easily

If you want to create something slightly different from your usual photographs, why don't you try Liveluvcreate which allows you to take some of your photographs and turn them into interesting layouts. Very simple and easy to use - I created the one below in a few moments. You can either share them on social media, via a direct URL or download to use later. 

Quote image creator

If you are looking for a nice way to jazz up a presentation, your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+ cover, then it's worth taking a look at Quotes Cover. You can either find a quotation, or use one of your own. You can choose to emphasis words in the quote, set the author and date details, decide on the use (or if you just want to, as a poster) and then choose from hundreds of fonts and colours. You can either use their backgrounds or you can upload your own, and then do a lot with that as well. All told it's a really nice tool and I'd certainly suggest that you have a look at it. I have included an example below, but if you're not keen, you could always try Quozio instead.