Grab your own open source vector graphics editor, for free!  With capabilities similar to Illustrator, Xara X, CorelDraw you can create some really amazing graphics with just a little practice.  If you are wanting to create some original icons, art or anything else for you website layout, this is the program to use.

Before I get too far down the rabbit whole, let me explain real quick what vector graphics are.  It is a resolution-independent image.  No matter how big you make it, the image still looks relatively the same. In contrast, something like a bitmap (bmp) image is locked down to a specific resolution and can not be blown up or made smaller without distorting the original image a lot.

Inkscape will run on Windows, Linux and Mac – so nobody has an excuse not to try this great program out. You really should try Inkscape out for free.  I would recommend you go download it, and then head right over to the tutorials to see what kind of amazing things you can create. I am really amazed by how in depth this free program is.

Of all the image editing programs out there, Paint.NET is slowly becoming my favorite.  Not only is it totally free, but it really stand the test against a lot of expensive image editing tools when it comes to functionality too.

Going into the history of the program, it was originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint program that has come with Windows for years.  Over time though it has simply overshadowed that tool, and is now mentioned more within the ranks of Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP.

Here is a little more about the program from the developers:

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Want to give it a shot? You can download this almost perfect image editor from getpaint.net. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think.  It might be the best free image editor out there.

Ever wonder if there was a search engine devoted to just searching Twitter images? Oh there is – and its name is Twtimage.  This website is a Twitter photo search engine.  It will fetch search results from twitpic, tweetphoto, img.ly and yfrog.com.  So, how does it work and is it worth your time?

Well, to start things out we navigate ourselves to the website, and type in a search term. I am going to type in HostingCon 2010, since that happened last week.  I am sure somebody had pictures of that, right?

Darn it.  Ok, how about we go with that other big convention, ComicCon?  Whoo hoo, we have results…

When you click on one of the thumbnailed images in the search results, you are taken to the main page for that image on whatever service it was fetched from.

While it might not be perfect yet – I would definitely say to keep an eye on twtimage.com as I am sure it will only get better from here.

WordPress is a great publishing platform to use when you want to circulate your own collection of video or images on the Web.  Thanks to a few great plugins, you can take your dull text-based blog and really snaz it up with some great internet imagery.  Want to great a photo gallery?  Want to plug YouTube into your web site?  I have collected twenty of the best multimedia plugins for you to use with your own WordPress powered web site.

Page Flip Image Gallery – Flipping Book plugin helps you to create Image Gallery with Page Flip effects on your WordPress blog.

Post videos and photo galleries – Post your videos and photo galleries/flash slideshows easily and in seconds.

NextGEN Gallery – NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

WordTube – WordTube is your Media Center plugin for WordPress.

Flickr Photo Album – This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site.

Lightbox 2 – Plugin used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.

Smart YouTube – Smart YouTube plugin allows you to insert full featured YouTube videos into your post, comments and in RSS feed.

SEO Friendly Images – SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes the tags w3c/xHTML.

Thumbnail Viewer – A minimalist image viewer with an effect similar to Lightbox JS, only much faster with a whole lot less Javascript.

Flash Video Player – The flash video plugin for WordPress allows the addition of video (and other media) to a WordPress website using standards-compliant markup

PhotoXhibit – PhotoXhibit provides an interface to set up gallery widgets using Picasa / Flickr / SmugMug / WordPress Uploads and jQuery.

Shutter Reloaded – Darkens the current page and displays an image on top (like Lightbox, Thickbox, etc.), but is a lot smaller (10KB) and faster.

WordPress Video Plugin – A filter for WordPress that displays videos from many video services. Enter [videosite id] at a post and you will see a video.

Random Image Selector – Selects a random image from a specified folder, and provides.

podPress – A dream plugin for Podcasters using WordPress.

Yet Another Photoblog – Convert your WordPress 2.5+ installation into a full featured photoblog in virtually no time.

PhotoSmash Galleries – PhotoSmash – user contributable photo galleries for WordPress pages and posts with options. Auto-add galleries or specify.

All in One Video Pack – Easily add full video capabilities to your blog.

WordPress Media Flickr – You can post with Flickr photo, on visual editor toolbar.It’s very interactive interface than other plugins.

TubePress – Displays gorgeous YouTube and Vimeo galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar. Please visit http://tubepress.org for more info!

With any mixture of the above plugins for WordPress, your web site will be taken from a text-based bore to a multimedia powerhouse.  Have any other suggestions for plugins I might have missed?  Leave your thoughts in the comments!

A new online tool, JustPaste.it makes it easy to share text and graphics over the Web.  This service allows you to quickly paste text directly from your word processor of choice onto the online page.  You can then spruce up your documents with text formatting, colors and more.

By using “Upload images” module you can easily add new graphic to your notes. You can embed videos by using [video] marks, for example: [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOXvdfcct8g[/video].

There really isn’t much more to say – it is a simple tool that gets the job done. Two other features worth mentioning are:

• Easily Export to PDF
• Easily Import from MS Word

Also, each page can be assigned a custom name, such as justpaste.it/anything.

So if you are looking for a tool to help you quickly share your writings with others, JustPaste.it is the way to go.

How simple is it?  All you do is click on one of the empty “Upload Image” boxes, select the image, wait and you are done.

Really, that is it.  No more.  It is that simple.  How simple?  This is such an easy image uploading process that Picamatic decided to do almost the same exact thing.

So, which one is the better option?  I figured, since he has used both, I would ask Plug Man himself.  What do you think Plug-meister?

Actually I am ashamed in this great day and age of Internet innovation, that two online companies could show no courage to really make their own online tool more unique for the public at large.  And furthermore…

Ok, that is enough Plug Man.

But honestly, in this day of Web 2.0, you would think that one would be more encouraged to go their own route and not be afraid of vicissitude.

Ok, we get it – anyways, yes both Pict and Picamatic offer a really unique way to upload your graphics or images in a single click.  As for which one you should use? Try them both and see which one performs better for you, because as Plug Man said, neither are all that innovative once you get past the cool single click free image uploading and hosting.

Here is a screen shot of the program’s interface:

Here is a little more about the program from the developers:

Photobie is built upon .NET framework 2. It contains all general photo editing and painting features. It is a perfect screen capture tool for you to do screen capture and editing in one place. It is also a perfect digital scrapbooking tool that allows you to apply embellishment, masking and templating easily and efficiently. And it is a perfect animation tool that allows you to create GIF animation efficiently. It supports many embedded filters as well as Photoshop free 8bf filters. It supports user customized brushes, textures, masks and regions.

Now that might look like a lot of bells and whistles to play with.  Thankfully, they have a lot of tutorials too. Here a few of my favorite Photobie tutorials I have found thus far out there (I’m sure I’ll find many more later!).

• Photo Editing Tutorials
• Paint and Graphic Project Tutorials
• Screen Capture and Manipulation Tutorials

You can pick up this free image editing tool at Photobie.com.  How do you think it stacks up to some of the other free image editors out there?

You can make two different styles of icons.  One is based around the CS3 look and feel and the other is your basic Web 2.0 style star badge.

To save your simple creation, just use the “Create icon” button, and you are good to go.  This is perfect for any webmaster who has been looking for a quick and easy way to make some stylish graphics for the web site they are working on.

You can pickup the Clockmaker Icon Generator on the Adobe Marketplace web site.

Free image web hosts are a dime a dozen, and with that said here is another time for your piggy bank of free web hosting options.  ImgLot delivers free image hosting with the idea of simplicity in mind.  Trying it out, I uploaded a test image here.

Site features include:

• Free uploading.
• No bandwidth limits.
• Images are never deleted.

The only thing that the web site’s creator is asking in return, is that you tell others about the ImgLot hosting service.  After you upload your image, you are given the option of a direct link, a page, forum code for linking and HTML code too.  You can also share your image on a number of different social news and networking sites.

Give them a shot at ImgLot.com and follow them on Twitter (@ImgLot) for more news and updates.

Think of it as a visual reminder for the browser of what site you are on.  This is really handy when it comes to favicons in tabs, because you can quickly see and think “Oh, there is an ‘m’ there, and it looks like Mitch’s layout – that tab must be where I loaded Mitchelaneous.com”.

Favicon creation is not that hard, as long as you have a good graphic editing program.  What you need to remember is keep it 16×16 pixels and name it favicon.ico. Also it will need to be in the root folder for the domain in question – so for example on most Linux-based/cPanel hosting plans for your primary domain name that would be your public_html folder. If it is located somewhere else you can specify a location with these strings in between your <head> and </head> code on your web page:

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/ico" href="/favicon.ico" />

Going back to the favicon creation, there are several good resource online to help you get this done quickly and easily.  Here are some of my favorite favicon generators:

• FavIcon from Pics
• Dynamic Drive’s FavIcon Generator
• Favicon Generator and Gallery
• Anti FavIcon
• FaviconGenerator.com
• Favicon Editor
• Favicon Drawing Program
• Graphics Guru Favicon Generator

There you can quickly create, edit and download your own personal favicon to use.  It cuts some of the work out of the overall chore of getting your favicon ready for public consumption.