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Cropping, editing, resizing, and adding text to images are various actions that bloggers and photographers constantly perform. The most popular tools used to perform these actions range from high-performance products like Adobe Photoshop to the free-for-all Paint.NET and GIMP applications. However, the start-up times for these products can waste precious seconds if you only need to perform one action. Here are three great programs for Mac and Windows to resize images on the fly.

The photo sharing market is growing at a steady clip and new services are released regularly. In this round-up, we compare the features and usability of 10 of our favorite photo sharing sites. Two years ago, we published a similar list. So now seems a good time for us to revisit the topic.

Some of these sites focus more on mainstream users and photo-finishing, while others stand out because of their extensive social features. Note: we've included a full table of features for the services listed (see below).

Tonight, Microsoft has publicly launched Photosynth, its long awaited Live Labs product that allows you to stitch your photos together to create a detailed 3D environment.  While most of the computation is done on your desktop, the images are uploaded to Microsoft's servers and Microsoft is giving all Photosynth users a total of 20GB of storage for their collections. The rendering and browsing is done with the help of Seadragon, another Live Labs product.

Cooliris' PicLens is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest browser add-ons currently available. When we first reviewed it in February, Josh Catone called it 'nifty' and 'gorgeous.' Both of these adjectives still fully apply to PicLens, but since then, the company has added a large number of new features. These include a stronger emphasis on displaying videos and integration with Amazon, as well as support for a few more photo sharing sites.

Sometimes you stumble across something that really makes you say "wow" and reminds you that there's so much more to this internet thing than just the latest web app. Case in point is this article describing some of the visual resources available on the web. The deep web. These images won't show up in search engines' image searches or on Flickr (save one exception), but instead can only be accessed via the links below.

Scrnshots, currently in private beta, is meant to serve as a community for designers to share their screenshots of interesting or beautiful designs. However, the service, which allows you to upload shots which others can use via an embed code, has the potential to be more than just a niche community for artistic types.

PicLens is a nifty web browser addon from Cooliris that I hadn't tried until the company emailed us a couple of weeks ago to let us know that they had updated their software with a couple of new features, both stunning and useful. If you haven't tried out PicLens yet, this is definitely a good time to hop on board, as the browser addon is a lot of fun to play with and makes searching and viewing images on the web very enjoyable.

Have you ever wondered what the English language looks? Yeah, neither have I. But a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University did, and tapping into the billions of images freely available on the Internet, they came up with a visual map of the English language using nearly 80 million of those images. The images are arranged based on the semantic relationship between words, and thus, according to the researchers, the project explores "the relationship between visual and semantic similarity."