FlauntR

Like splashy graphics? FlauntR is a veritable eye-candy store crammed with effects, fonts, clip art, borders, and other tools. It can create slide shows and prep images to be social-network avatars or cell-phone wallpaper. You can apply color schemes from famous paintings to your images, create electronic greeting cards, or even slap your photo on a mock magazine cover.

But accessing all that power can be difficult. FlauntR's assorted features are divvied up among half a dozen subapplications with names such as StylR, EditR, and TextR; it isn't always obvious what's where, and it takes a few seconds to hop between the applets. An Undo button appears and disappears depending on where you are, and the controls for tweaking effects sit in a window so small that you sometimes must scroll around to see all the options a particular effect offers.

Oh, and one other thing: FlauntR works only on Windows PCs. All the other services I tried for this roundup ran on both PCs and Macs, as a good Web app should. (See our chart and slide show.)

FlauntR is nowhere near as frustrating as Picture2Life, but it lacks the elegance and efficiency of FotoFlexer, Photoshop Express, and Picnik. At least FlauntR doesn't claim to be ready for prime time: Although it appeared in 2007, it's still labeled an alpha release.