Photo Drop: Edit Images in Just Seconds From Your Dashboard

Who would have thought you could easily edit, spice up and export your photos from the comfort of your Dashboard? Who would have thought you could do it for free? Photo Drop, by Dropping Inc., is a free widget that lets you resize, crop, and add cool effects to your photos much more quickly than you might expect. Photo Drop is fun and easy to use and is an excellent alternative to waiting for Photoshop to load every time you accidentally quit between photo edits!

While Photo Drop features a very simple interface it is deceptively full of cool features. After dragging your image onto the widget, by dragging the image and activating the Dashboard, it only takes a couple of clicks and you can apply one of a number of stylized effects to your photo. Photo Drop includes eight excellent Quartz-based effects such as 1 Bit color, Pushpin, Shadow, Toy Camera and Reflection. Shadow and Tape are two effects in particular that make me wish something like this had been around years ago. It seems I’m always taking time to start up an application like Photoshop just to add a very simple drop shadow or a stylized boarder to a couple of shots, a task that would only take moments to do with Photo Drop.

Further adjustments you can make in Photo Drop include scaling images, rotating them to correct crooked or sideways pictures and applying a copyright watermark of your name and the year. When you start scaling or rotating your image a grid and some useful information like image dimension and angle of rotation appear to aid you in editing the image to perfection. Exporting your edited photo is especially easy. When you are happy with the changes you have made to the image press the “Done” button and Photo Drop will display the edited photo with a few options. From here you can choose one of three handy ways to export: you can save to the desktop, save to the clipboard or simply drag the photo to wherever you want to place it. Photo Drop gives you the option of exporting your image in a number of standard formats including PNG, TIFF or JPEG.

Generally all of Photo Drop’s features are easily controlled; the cropping, scaling and sizing are controlled from the widget’s front, and the watermark, export, and effect selections are made on the back of the widget. The single concern I have about Photo Drop’s interface is the presence of a mysterious “Color Adjustment” toggle located on the back of widget, the use of which is completely beyond me. In a number of trials I was unable to find any difference in color output with and without the Color Adjustment toggle enabled. That said, for it’s intended purpose Photo Drop is almost perfect. Photo Drop doesn’t include batch processing so it probably won’t replace Photoshop or Fireworks for users who are adding effects to dozens of images at a time, but it supplies a satisfying, stylish and simple way to quickly edit a couple of photos in a few seconds - and all for free.

I’ve really enjoyed my experience using Dropping Inc.’s widget Photo Drop. It has made me more productive and I plan on keeping it in my Dashboard indefinitely. I think the Japanese duo Kenichi Yoshida and Tomonaga Tokuyama of Dropping Inc. have hit a home-run with this handy little widget and I’ll be keeping an eye out for their future creations. Photo Drop is free, and can be downloaded from Dropping Inc.