Behold: An alternative to Flickr and Google Image Search

Behold^TM is a search engine for high-quality Flickr images. It aims to answer your queries based on what is inside the images -- at the pixel level. It offers a completely new way to search for images, using techniques of computer vision. It is different to standard image search engines, such as Flickr or Google, because those search through images using only image tags and filenames.

Behold looks for high quality images, so you don't have to sift through hundreds of poorly taken pictures to find a good one. Behold uses both aesthetic and technical quality indicators to find some of the best images available online.

Behold draws computational power from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to handle large volumes of images.  Access it here.

Great basic Photoshop alternative for Students in Splashup.com

Splashup is a great little photo / image editor that works straight from the browser.  It is really user friendly and will easily be handled by students and novices alike but it also has some depth to it.  For example photoshop users will be impressed to see that you can use layers which puts it above many basic / free image editors that are available out there.

It links into all the major web based photo sharing services such as Picasa, Flickr Etc and has a range of dynamic brushes and filters.

All in all this is definitely one of the best free Photoshop alternatives for beginners I have seen and would definitely solve most beginners problems easily right from the browser. This program would be great for students earning their graphic design degree online too. Check it out here.