Piccyfix Photo, Picture and Image Upload Help

What Piccyfix does, and how it works

Piccyfix is a free online picture editor with a difference. It's easy to use for one thing!

The big thing is that it's wizard based, which means you start at the beginning, by uploading your photo into your browser, running the wizard steps that you want, then generate your final picture. Easy!

A lot of free online photo editors (just like a lot of software) are very clever and powerful, but they are so complex that you just get hopelessly lost in them. Especially if you are trying to do something really easy. Often, it feels like you need to be a rocket scientist just to resize your picture and save it. The help pages dazzle you with gamma, hue and saturation options. You what ?

A while back Piccyfix figured out (from lots of your kind feedback :-) that all that you and me really want to do with our pictures, images and photos is:

Resize and Rotate them to make them smaller (and sometimes bigger), but mostly smaller, to turn them the right away around, so we can email them to friends, and put them up on a website eg. MySpace
Change the Image Format, as different websites and image processing software accept different formats,
Improve the quality of the pictures by changing the brightness and contrast, and cropping (or cutting out) sections of them.
And finally, mess about with them for fun, by adding borders and affects.

And so Piccyfix evolved into a wizard offering 3 options - Resize/Rotate, Change Format, and All Steps (a combination of all bullet points). Before uploading, you simply pick which of these three options you want to do, and you're on your way.

Recently, we've added a Picture Gallery so everyone else can see your piccies if you want. And also added free hosting, which saves you the hassle of uploading and downloading images between websites all the time.

What Piccyfix needs to run

Piccyfix runs from just about ANY modern browser, but has been tested in IE6/7, Safari, Opera andFirefox.

It does not use Microsoft ActiveX Controls, Plug-Ins, Widgets, or any other add-ons to your browser that cause security problems, or cause certain things not to work in different browsers.

Apart from plain HTML and images, the only special thing it does is use a tiny bit of Javascript to give you picture upload progress information. But you are free to disable Javascript in your browser, and the whole site (apart from giving you upload information) will work fine.

Piccyfix does not use 'pop-up' ads that automatically appear in a new browser window unprompted. If you do have Javascript enabled, some browsers treat the upload progress window as a pop-up, and if you have pop-up ads disabled, you might not see the upload progress information. It's quite useful. For this reason, you are completely safe to configure your browser to allow pop-up windows in Piccyfix. You will never get a flying ad appear, or some flash animation to make you sea-sick. We do have normal banner ads, but they sit where they're told, and they behave themselves, PROMISE!

Finally, we do not use persistent cookies (ie cookies that hang around after your have closed your browser). So we don't track you in any way. We do use what are called 'session cookies' which are needed to hold state information from one page to the next while you're using the wizard. But these disappear when you close the browser. So you can disable persistent cookies in your browser, and Piccyfix will work fine.

How to Upload your Picture, Photo or Image

From the home page, click on the Browse button in the form at the bottom. Note that some browsers show this is 'Browse', some as 'Choose' etc. But it's something like that..

A windows will open which allows you to select the image file that you want to upload into Piccyfix. Using the explorer type window, find the file on your pc and accept it.

The images files that you can upload are the most commonly used formats - .jpg, .gif, .bmp and .png, and you can upload a picture of up to 8 megapixels in size. That's big!

Next, choose if you want Hosting and / or put the photo into the Gallery. Please click on these links and read the help pages before ticking the boxes!

Finally, click on the button to decide which set of wizard steps you want to run, and the upload starts. If the upload progress windows doesn't appear (either you have javascript disabled or your browser is blocking the window), nothing obvious will appear to happen until the photo is uploaded. Your browser might have something on the status line like 'Sending to piccyfix.com', and if you hover over the page, it will be in a browser 'busy' state. Just leave it finish... it will do eventually.

When the upload has completed, a thumbnail of your photo is shown. Click on the picture to start.

From there it's dead easy. Piccyfix will just guide you through the steps you have chosen, you pick the best picture on each step (and possible tinker a bit..), then generate your final image.

If you're asking - I've got broadband, why does uploading take so long, when I can download music and other stuff much faster ? The answer is that if you are using an ADSL (rather than cable), you can only upload at a speed of about less than 1/10th of your download speed. And since you're uploading rather than downloading, it takes a long time. Cable connections are much faster.

How to get more help on each wizard step

If you have a look at the bottom of this page (or any page), there will always be a set of Help pages for every feature in Piccyfix. Even if you are part way through the wizard, you can safely click on any help page, and at the bottom of that page there will be a link to return to the last wizard step you were on. So you don't have to remember everything about every step.

How to get EVEN more help

Easy, Contact us using the link at the bottom!

A Final Note about Internet Browsers

Piccyfix *loves* both Firefox and Opera internet browsers.

We use them all the time as our browsers of choice during site development and testing, as they are fast, stable, secure, reliable, dependable, well-written, standards-compliant replacements to Internet Explorer 6/7.

The new version of Opera is a small download, seems bug free(so far!), is lightening fast, and very easy to use. Use the links below and try another browser! Both are free of course.