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Photo Collage Creator features dozens of great frames, borders, and editing effects to show off your photos. However, it's a little hard to use and even harder to dodge its incessant ads.

The app makes you submit to not one, but two different ad agreements before you can use it. It has pop-up ads that are nearly impossible to close without an accidental tap or two, as well. You are rewarded with dozens of different frames for your collage once you make it through the ads, though. There are plenty of effects and borders you can use on each … Read more

Photo Editor for Instagram will let you edit your photos with different effects and frames, but it makes all the wrong moves to get you there. All you get for putting up with the annoying ads are some run-of-the-mill features and shaky performance.

This app appears with the name "Color FX" in your app locker and "Photo Makeover" in all of its menus. Whatever you call it, Photo Editor for Instagram has nothing to do with Instagram, so don't expect any of the look and feel of that app. It does co-opt some of Instagram'… Read more

Unlike most apps of its ilk, PhotoFram.es HD is an ad-free framing app that really works. There aren't many downsides that come with these great, high resolution frames. You will have to pay a pretty penny to unlock them all, but the free app has a lot on offer if you choose not to upgrade.

There are about 50 or so frames in each of this app's seven categories. About one-third of the app's frames are locked behind a paywall that will cost you $5 (or $1 per category) to lift, but you shouldn't bother. … Read more

Google Glass just got a little bit better.

The search giant on Tuesday announced new software for the Google Glass camera that will improve photo taking. The update gives Glass the ability to snap multiple photos at once and combine them, so users can get the best shot. The camera can now also detect low-light environments and will automatically brighten an image to make it clearer. It's also capable of doing a better job of capturing movement.

In addition to the new camera features, users can now also add captions to photos they take.

Of course, there's one … Read more

Web-based photo editing took a second step forward Tuesday with the release of WebRaw, a tool that uses Mozilla's ASM.js technology for the computationally intense process of handling raw photos.

Raw photo formats, available on high-end cameras, offer better image quality and more editing flexibility, but they also are much more of a hassle than standard formats like JPEG, in part because they're so burdensome for computers to decode. That's why the demo, from Mozilla's Vladimir Vukicevic, is interesting: processing raw photos is the sort of chore that only a couple of years ago would … Read more

Analog Camera is a simple photo editor from RealMac software, the same folks who made the to-do-list app Clear. Like Clear, the app is as bare bones as it gets, but the minimalist design and intuitive controls make photo sharing incredibly quick and easy.

Analog Camera is not a full-featured photo editor in the same vein as apps like KitCam or PhotoToaster. Instead, it offers only a couple of features in the interest of convenience and quick sharing. When you launch the app, you immediately see the viewfinder so you can take a picture right away. But at the top … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers asked about using drives attached to a Time Capsule as separate shared backup destinations for Time Machine, how to deal with managing photos both in the Finder and in iPhoto, and managing a completely black MacBook screen.

I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Using multiple shares on a Time Capsule for Time Machine backups MacFixIt reader Gregg asks:

At startup Pics.io, a Ukrainian trio thinks it's time for the Web browser to take on a computing task that thus far has resisted the inexorable shift toward cloud computing: raw photo editing.

Eager for higher quality and flexibility, photography enthusiasts and pros have gravitated toward raw photos formats, which record cameras' image data directly without processing into a more convenient but limited JPEG. But handling raw photos is a processor-intensive task -- the kind of thing that Web-based software historically hasn't been good at and the kind of thing that people buy specialized software such as … Read more

With Postcards, it is possible to create and send an actual paper postcard from your iPhone to anyone in the world in less than a couple of seconds. The cost is higher than you might pay for a ready-made postcard, but the convenience and customization options available make for a very unique, engaging experience, wherever you happen to be traveling.

Postcards is similar to many other apps that offer the same service, but it is streamlined to a certain degree. You open the app and either take or choose a photo to send, then do some light modifications to that … Read more