If you’re ready to turn those idle digital photos into fine art, there’s CanvasPop. The site lets you create customized artwork on high quality canvas from just about any photo, all for a very reasonable cost.

Creating your artwork is as simple as uploading your image and choosing the size canvas you’d like, though CanvasPop offers tons of options to customize your new artwork, like multiple panel displays, filter effects, custom sizes, and framing.

We especially love the ability to upload photos from Facebook, Instagram, your phone or just about anywhere without having to worry about the resolution or print quality: CanvasPop’s in-house designers will work with you and your image (and filters, if necessary) to make sure your art is wall-worthy.

And to help you express yourself, CanvasPop is offering a free 8″x10″ canvas for Netted subscribers simply for liking them on Facebook. Those looking to go big can forgo the free canvas, and instead get a $49 credit toward a larger size.

We’re hoping the home decor upgrade will get us bumped up the waiting list for “So You Think You Can Design With the Stars.”

Using Gif Shop for iPhone and Gif Stitch for Android has been all the entertainment we need. The mobile apps make creating and sharing hilarious animated gifs easy and fun.

Using Gif Shop is as easy as loading the app and tapping the screen every time you want to grab a frame. When you’re finished, the images will loop to create a stop-motion short that you can email or upload to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter in seconds.

Gif Stitch for Android offers an easy-to-use interface similar to its iPhone counterpart, but also gives you the option of adding color effects.

You’re just seconds away from the world seeing your dog doing a back flip. Now all we have to do is convince everyone in our office to get back to work.

Finally, Ge.tt offers both incredibly fast upload time and the ability to share links before they’re completely uploaded. Recipients simply wait for the upload on your end to finish and the file is good to go.

Without a single installer or external app in sight, you can upload everything from music to photos and more. Your uploaded files can be accessed up for at least 90 days.

Ge.tt also offers analytics so you can see how many people have seen your link. Those adorable pictures of your corgis will be circling Twitter and Tumblr faster than you can track.

It’s the Internet the way it was supposed to be: full of sharing, staring, caring, corgis and impatience.

Now we use Pixlr-o-matic to make our snapshots look better. It lets you alter your digital photos or webcam pictures with a bevy of gorgeous and fun filters and effects.

It works a lot like Instagram for your desktop. You can use it to add awesome–if not awesomely cheesy–special borders, popping colors or a faux-vintage feel.

Once you’re done, you can download the picture or easily share it with a link. Is it corny at times? Absolutely. Awesomely corny.

When your photo masterpieces are ready, consider immortalizing them with Photogram. The free iPhone app lets you send custom photo messages with up to 4 pictures. Once you’ve framed your images with confetti or a moonscape (our personal favorite), you can instantly share them with friends and family over Twitter, Facebook or email.

Send this to mom next time she suggests another family photo sitting with matching sweaters.

Netted has you covered with online tools to help you get the most out of your summer trips while making sure your time and money are well spent. So grab your sunscreen, prep your flight-booking fingers and get ready to hit the road–it’s vacation time.

The best new way we’ve found to spread photo love is with Postagram. For just $.99, you can turn your mobile photos into a postcard and send them to friends and family right from the iPhone app or the web.

Just write a personalized message, enter an address and hit send. Photos pop out from their mailing form, so your snapshots can be stored, hung or framed. The app also links to your Instagram account if you’re as big a fan of their awesome filters as we are.

We think it’s a great alternative to sending an MMS or emailing, and sending a postcard is still as much fun as receiving one. That’s why we’ve already sent 6 this week.

If you’re looking for picture sharing in bulk, Keepsy makes building a custom photo album super easy. Just import the images you’d like, select a theme, and have it shipped. Prices start as low as $29.95.

Nothing against interpretive dance, but these snapshots look a lot better than us flailing around in a leotard.

Relax: Canvas On Demand is here for the last-minute save. They’ll take your favorite sentimental photos and turn them into gorgeous canvas prints fit to be displayed by any proud mother.

Just upload the image you’d like printed and pick a size. We recommend any pictures that make you look heroic but humble enough to appreciate the decades of motherly guidance that got you where you are today.

You can choose a simple thin or thick gallery wrap, or have the canvas framed. To really kick it up a notch, you can opt for a panoramic photo split or multi-piece wall displays.

Photos can be made black and white or sepia at no cost. Any picture can be retouched for a small cost, and backgrounds can be replaced; finally that burning ice cream truck at your last family picnic can be wiped from your memories.

Rush ordering is the best way to make sure it arrives in time for the big day. And since we want both you and your mom to be happy, you can take 25% off by using the coupon code “MAMAMIA25” at checkout. Enjoy!

Path allows you to connect more meaningfully with the people you care about by harnessing the emotional power of instant photo and video sharing. The difference? Only your very closest friends and family take part.

By limiting your network to only fifty of your close friends and family, Path serves as a kind of private social network. It solves the problem of having to send multiple emails and MMS messages by reaching everyone you care about in one easy step.

We like how the intimacy of your network frees you to post whatever photos you’d like (no more “your baby and puppy photos are clogging my news feed” complaints from friends). Even if you’re more of a broad-social-circle type, you can still make use of the great filters and upload your photos directly to Facebook, complete with friend tags.

Besides, who better to express your undying love of cakes shaped like Darth Vader than to the loving parents who introduced you to Star Wars?

We wish someone had told us that driving our DeLorean at 88 MPH wouldn’t allow us to go back in time. It would’ve spared us a lot of time, energy, and the $150 we spent on that “authentic” flux capacitor we found on craigslist. Fortunately for us, our old standby “the Internet” has provided a few options to help us revisit days gone by.

4squaredand7yearsago lets you step back in time with a daily email showing you your foursquare check-ins from the same day last year. Considering the places we’ve checked into (hello, Stephen Colbert rally), the nostalgia potential is limitless.

Last Night’s Check-ins is perfect if you often forget where you’ve been and suddenly materialize in pictures online.  Every day, you’ll receive an email detailing your previous night’s locations, which you can annotate and store on the site like a GPS enabled diary.

Photojojo’s Time Capsule lets you reminisce without foursquare. Using your Flickr account, pictures from the previous year will be sent to you in a bimonthly email. It’s excellent for remembering the night you helped Chuck Berry invent rock ‘n’ roll at the school dance.

With reliving the past covered, we’re going back to demanding that President Obama fund hoverboard research.

To get your Ansel Adams on, try Instagram, a fast, beautiful and fun way to both alter and share your photographic life with your friends.

The free app for your iPhone allows you to transform the look and feel of your photos by choosing one of 11 filters. For example, you can use “1977” to make your living room look like a Gerald Ford era den or “Lomo” to Polaroid-ize your party shots for an 80’s vibe.

The best part is that once your new masterpiece has been created, Instagram allows you to easily post it to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr.

If you’re an Android user, you can accomplish much of the same with picplz, which lets you apply filters and easily upload your photos to your various social networks.

You don’t even need to shake your phone to make the pictures develop.

Living in a city means access to lots of artsy events.  Finding out about those events, however, requires a helping hand.

Enter Creative Everyone, a go-to guide to all the most interesting creative-oriented events in the U.S. and the UK.

The site functions as an online community center for creative types, enabling you to find events pertaining to art, architecture, design, fashion, literature and the like.

Setting up an account lets you take advantage of the site’s built-in diary (which can send you notifications and reminders) and saves your search criteria for easy viewing.

If you’re the proactive type, you can also post your own creative events. If the editors like the look of them, they’ll be featured them in the main listings.

Now get off your couch and start taking in some cultcha!

While taking photos is easier than ever these days, sharing photos online usually involves a fair amount of frustration (especially for your more mature relatives).

Thankfully, there’s Yogile, a easy way to share photos with friends and family online.

Whenever you upload photos, invite whichever friends and family you’d like to view or add photos to your album. Each album features a customizable URL, and contributors can upload photos by sending them to a custom email address.

Each account allows 100MB of uploads per month of printable quality photos (upgrades for more space are available for $24.95 per year).

And unlike Flickr or Facebook, there’s no need for friends and family to register to view or upload pictures, making photo sharing simple and hassle-free.

Your grandparents will thank you.

You spend a lot of time looking through photos and videos on the web. Unfortunately, it can be slow and arduous to wade through all that imagery.

For a more intuitive way to look there’s Cooliris, a browser plug-in that turns photos and videos into an impressive 3-D wall.

Download the free software (Firefox and IE are supported) and install the plug-in to your browser.

From then on, whenever you’re viewing image-heavy pages, simply roll your mouse over an image or click the icon in the top right corner of your browser window.

The interface has a search bar so you can easily browse major sites such as Google image search, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr.

Cooliris also allows you to set up a homepage by bookmarking your interests. You can surf clips and your favorite shows anytime by opening a blank window and clicking the Cooliris icon.
We know you’re sick of all things 3-D, but this is one case where an exception should be made.

Enter TripTracker, a service that adds a layer of social networking and mapmaking to your travelogues.

To begin, sign up for a free account. Then add the details of the trip you want to brag about. You can upload photos, write journal entries and create maps that track the journey.

Perhaps the coolest feature on the site is the GPS track, which allows you to remotely upload data from your GPS unit to create a travel map to share with family and friends. TripTracker supports a wide variety of major, name-brand GPS units.

You’ll never have to remember to send a postcard again.

Now you can, thanks to Photozini, a service that allows you to turn your digital photos into a printed magazine.Start by ordering a kit through Photozini’s website (they cost $40). In a few days, you’ll receive a box with a 512MB USB card, instructions and a prepaid return envelope.

Simply load the photos you want to use onto the USB card (you can load up to 150 images), and then mail it back.

You don’t have to worry about ordering the photos or laying them out—Photozini will do that, using the time stamp data from the image (If you don’t like the results, you can return it within 30 days for a full refund).

Three weeks later you’ll receive a soft-cover magazine featuring your friends and family, printed on 100 lb glossy stock (thicker than the average magazine).

If someone else wants a copy, simply give them the copy code on back cover of the magazine. Reprints cost $20.

It may not be as big a deal as landing the cover of Vogue or GQ, but it’s a better Father’s Day gift than that tie you were going to select.

Enter Face.com, a powerful facial recognition tool that uses imaging technology to identify faces in a photo, allowing you to tag en masse.

Their PhotoTagger and Photo Finder apps help you organize your Facebook photos, while Celebrity Findr searches Twitter for otherwise hard-to-find photos of celebrities. (Gotcha, Conan).

Open up Photo Tagger and you’ll be taken into your Facebook account. When you click on a photo album, Face.com automatically scans it for untagged pictures with faces that match those in already-tagged photos (anywhere on the FB site, not just your profile).

Review the results, mark the photos you want Face to label, and click on Approve All to tag the entire album.  (The app will prompt others who are tagged as well, to seek their approval).

Because it groups multiple shots together, it tags the photos in a matter of seconds.

And, yes, it’ll even tag photos taken in low light, as well as pictures where a person isn’t directly facing the camera.

The app also features something called “Face Alert,” which tells you when new public photos of you or you friends are uploaded to the site.  In the event that you don’t want to tag a photo, this will let you know that there are bad photos of you out there.

Getting your friends to remove them is another story (there’s no app for that, but bribing them may work).

Enter TinEye, a free “reverse image search engine” that allows you to find more information about any image (including, of course, other copies of that image).

To get started, simply upload any image (or its URL) and TinEye will scour the web for other versions. Resulting images are listed in order of relevance, with the first ones being exact matches, followed by examples of various other versions.

TinEye will even let you do a layered comparison between your original image and whatever else it finds so you can easily see any differences.

For those who want a similar function on mobile phones, there’s Google Goggles, which uses your smartphone’s camera (though it’s only on Android, for now) and a technology known as augmented reality to translate what your camera “sees” into real-time web results.

Google Goggles works with landmarks, books covers, contact info, paintings, logos and even wine labels.

It’s sort of like having a private eye on your payroll at all times.

Such is the case with the newly-acquired Picnik, a free photo editor that lives in the cloud.  This means you never have to leave your web browser to alter or access your photos.

Create an account—it’s free and simple—and upload your photos to your library. The site pulls from all the various sites where you’re likely to store them (Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, etc.)

Once you’ve stocked your collection, you can begin to edit.

The site offers all the tools you’d expect to find in full-service editing software, allowing you to adjust exposure and contrast, retouch blemishes, get rid of red-eye and crop your photos.

You can even set it to Furball to apply the tools to the family pet.

When you finish a photo, use Save & Share to preserve the photo and send it around. Picnik can post the photo on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or a personal website.

For $2 a month, you can upgrade to a Premium account, which gives you access to their full range of options, including complex layers and fullscreen editing.

Consider it Photoshop for people who like things free and easy.

Of course not.

Try Fotobabble and give mom a series of talking photographs, featuring your voice.

Adding audio to your photos using the free service is simple:  Just upload your photo, record your brilliant voice-over and send the newly enhanced piece of living art to your mother (and all of your social network friends, etc).

The site lets you add up to a minute of audio.

Not happy with your vocals?  You can re-record as many times as you want, and you can also edit the piece once it’s saved.

There’s also an iPhone app so that you can make talking photos when you’re out in the real world, in real time.  (BlackBerry and Android versions are in the works).

Now go make some photo funnies.

To help navigate we suggest you try DP Review, a vast and thorough repository that cuts through the clutter.

To start you search for a specific camera or brand you want more information about. (They also cover lenses, which can be more confusing than cameras). From there, DP Review will retrieve content from ten years’ worth of archived reviews.

Once you’ve selected a camera to review, the site thoroughly breaks down the pros and cons in a number of important categories. Evaluating everything from design to software to comparison tests with other competitive models, the reviews are amazingly detailed.

They’re also organized into digestible parts, which is what makes comparison and selection so easy.

Those without a specific camera in mind can use the buyer’s guide, which allows you to search via a variety of categories (pixels, digital zoom, etc.). Based on your criteria the database provides several recommended options to choose from.

They also offers a comprehensive glossary, a thorough camera database and a timeline of new digital camera product announcements going back to 1995 (which is when the first digital cameras were made available to consumers).

The only thing the site won’t do is make the ultimate decision for you.

Thanks to a new service called Citrify, you can edit your photos for free.

And, unlike other editing tools, this one can be used via your browser (their Flash interface is very intuitive and well-designed).

The Touch-Up menu provides a wide range of cosmetic tools, including a “Wrinkle” button to remove lines and a Blemish function for covering things up.  There’s even a “Toothbrush” button, which adds whitening.

Of course you can also alter the brightness, saturation, contrast and hue of your photos with easy-to-use sliders.

With the Effects button, you can filter your photo to look like a watercolor, tint someone green with the “Hulkify” option or use the ever-popular “Obamify” effect.

Don’t like what you’ve done? The app has an Undo button that logs all of your changes and lets you backtrack to your original settings at any point in the editing process.

And, with their new Facebook app you can directly edit the photos in your Facebook albums.

Try Scrapblog, a free service that lets you create custom multimedia scrapbooks from your photos, videos and music.  (You can pull this from your desktop or via social media sites where your media are stored).

Thanks to their patented “Scrapbook Builder” tool creating a custom book is literally a ten-minute process (we tested it, and we’re meticulous).

The tool offers hundreds of themes (including dozens devoted to “love,” for those of you so inclined).  Or you can start with a blank page and build your own from scratch.

You can also add videos, music and text along with embellishments like stickers, backgrounds and comic strip-like speech bubbles.

When your masterpiece is created you can share it across social media networks with one click.   And, in a nod to those of us still interested in analog artifacts, you can order a print version of your book (prices start at just $9.99).

Scrapbooking just got a whole lot cooler.

FrameChannel is a free service that allows you to share your photos with your friends and family by streaming content directly to their digital picture frames (they don’t have to do a thing).

To pair a digital frame (most major brands are compatible) with your FrameChannel account, just select the FrameChannel option on the device to generate a unique access code. Then simply enter it on the service’s website to link your account and the device together.

(The site can be a tad complicated but navigating it is well worth the effort).

From there, you can start subscribing to various “channels,” or sources of content to stream. Sites such as Flickr and Photobucket have plugins, allowing you to share uploaded photos with any or all of the photo frames synced to your account.

Any changes will be pushed automatically whenever a channel is updated—tag a new batch of photos of your child or your dog on Facebook, for example, and they will sync to the digital frame in the living room of the proud grandparents, a thousand miles away.

Yet another technological advancement those who remember having to load film into cameras will marvel at…

Those without endless amounts of time and patience (or a scanner) should consider outsourcing the task to Scan Digital, a video and film conversion service based in California.

As a first step you ship them your old photos, videos and film reels. There’s $10 charge for two-way shipping (once paid you can print the UPS shipping labels).

Because these are one of kind objects they offer a service called “Essential Tracker,” so you can be sure your goods are safe during transit.

They’ll sort everything out and get to work. This includes cropping, color correcting and removing dust, blemishes and red eye (and, of course, the actual digitizing).

A week later they’ll mail back the originals along with DVDs that contain all your old memories.  They’ll also create an online gallery, which makes it easy to share (and provides a back up in case you lose the DVDs).

Photos start at 48 cents (for a 300 dpi version). Videos (including VHS, mini DV and even Betamax) are $19.95 per cassette.  And film transfer costs 28 cents per foot.

But, of course, being able to share that long lost footage of you in your college-era punk band on Facebook is priceless.

Try Animoto, a web application that produces video slideshows from your photos, video clips and music.   It’s essentially a mash-up tool that allows everybody to be a director.

Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto claims its videos “have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.”

That may be overstating it a bit, but the results are very stylish, especially compared to static photos or slideshows.

Thanks to the site’s thoughtful design elements, producing videos is easy and fun.  All you do is upload your images and videos, add text titles and select the accompanying music (either from your library or their playlist).

You can create as many 30-second videos as you want for free.  Or you can join as a premium member for a special holiday rate of $30 a year, which allows you to create an unlimited number of videos that last as long as a song (and include longer video snippets).

The site analyzes the provided photos, video clips and music, automatically generating a movie trailer-like video. Every nuance of the song is analyzed, producing a completely unique video every time.

In other words, no two are ever the same.

The good news is that Animoto does all the hard work.  All you have to do is take credit for your original creation.

With Blurb.com, a self-publishing service that allows you to make glossy, professional-grade photo books, you can solve this problem and make use of the hundreds of digital photos sitting in some forgotten folder on your computer.

Using their proprietary BookSmart software you simply upload your photos, art and/or text, choosing from one of six book sizes (ranging from 7”x7” to 12”x12”) and selecting from various paper qualities and cover types.

Hi-res photos take a little time to load, but their system is intuitive and the editing process is fun.

A week after you finish they’ll ship you an art store-quality book with your photos (and words) spread across the pages.

Always wanted to be published?  You can even peddle your wares through their online store.

Now go ahead and make that coffee table book about coffee tables grandma has always wanted.

Shouldn’t there be a way to brag to friends and family that’s more tangible than an emailed jpeg?

Enter Hazelmail, a simple web service that creates and then snail mails a standard-sized postcard from anyplace in the world, using any photo you upload. (If you have an iPhone you can use their free new app to do this from, say, the top of a mountain).

While the character-driven Hazelmail site feels dated and some of the card-design elements are hokey (skip the borders and framing elements), this is one instance where function trumps form.

Why? Because each card costs just $1.50 (no matter where you happen to send from), including printing fees and postage.

And Hazelmail handles all the mailing logistics.  After you add an address and short message, you’re done.

Now let the geographic one-upping begin.