Tourist Remover
You probably took home some fantastic memories from your last vacation. That trip to Bangkok or London or Paris was the perfect opportunity to relax and experience another culture. You shot scores of photos at every major landmark, temple, church, beach, museum and public square. But when you got home and started looking through all of your pictures, something about them felt a little… off. Not quite perfect. What's the problem, you asked yourself. Then you realized it: In each carefully framed photo of Notre Dame, the building is obscured by some huckster selling newspapers or chewing gum. In an otherwise brilliantly composed shot of Koh Samui, there's a shirtless, sunburned retiree in gym shorts sucking down a melting gelato.
Never again, I tell you. Never again will your beautiful holiday photos be mucked up by those unphotogenic rubes. Now, there's Tourist Remover.
The new web service from futureLAB is part of their online photo management tool, Snapmania. It's pretty simple to use — just take multiple photos (4 or 5 usually does the trick, according to their how-to) of the same scene using a tripod, then feed the photos into your Snapmania account. Tourist Remover will take information from all of your photos and eliminate the differences, leaving you with a clean, obstruction-free view of the subject in the background.
Like other photo sharing sites, Snapmania offers free and paid services. The free account gives you 100MB of storage space, but your account is only active for a limited time. The paid account gives you 2GB of storage for a fee of 48 Swiss francs, or about $38.50 US per year. There is also an account option that gets you unlimited storage for 72 CHF per year, which is about $58.00 US.
In addition to Tourist Remover, Snapmania has some browser-based editing tools that look promising. Users can re-touch errors, correct colors, crop and resize. They also allow you to publish photo blogs, e-cards and slideshows. Snapmania's galleries and tools use Flash, so they won't surpass Photoshop anytime soon. Check out the live demo at Snapmania.com.
