it would be folly for educators having suffered inconvenience at best, data loss at worst, to commit their content yet again to a potentially unreliable cloud provider. Alec Couros sees this kind of thing happening more and more in the crystal ball future and suggests that schools and educators would be better off investing in self-hosting using FOSS, free and open source software (Couros, 2010).
As suggested above, the only reliable alternative to Ning is to host your community yourself, or at a trusted institution, where you do your own regular backups, and your content is safe behind a firewall, with a UPS power source in case of power outages, and perhaps some sort of RAID system to keep you running through system crashes.
I first heard about this software during a BAW session, when I knew nothing about working with pictures (not that I know much now! :-P!!!). Loved it immediately 'coz of its intuititive interface. Still today, I'm fascinated by how I can copy (while at the same time compress) tens of pictures from my mobile devices to my hard disk in just a couple of clicks and seconds!
Definitely worth trying!
Thanks Gladys and Paul for sharin these photo manipulation sites. We all need them nowadays.
I must confess I'm totally in love with Flickr together with Picnik . It gives lots of editing options, including adding text, special effects, etc and when I'm done, it saves directly to my Flickr account. Lots of fun and very useful to create tutorials, for example.