Add 3D Frames to Your Photos: Free Online Tools

It depends which website you're using, but all of these photo-enhancing free tools work about the same way.

1. Pick a photo frame from their library of backgrounds. (Here's "Moonlit Billboard")
2. Look for the "upload image" button. On Makesweet, it's a plus sign.



3. Makesweet has an extra step: click the plus sign again to upload a graphic, OR click the "ABC" button to add text! (You can do both on the same image)

4. Once you've uploaded your graphic, Makesweet lets you scale your image (the vertical slider) or rotate it (the compass below the slider). Also click and hold on the image to drag it around within the frame. The red "X" button lets you clear the image or text and try again.

Different free online tools have different controls.

4.5 For Makesweet ANIMATED photo frames only: Click the Movie icon and choose "Hi-res." This creates the animation. Otherwise, when you save, you'll just get a still image.

5. Done? Click the Disk icon to save it to your computer. Save it under a DIFFERENT NAME than your original image! You don't want to erase your original.



6. Open it in your computer's graphics program to see how it looks. You may want to increase the contrast or crop the image (sometimes Makesweet has extra white margins on both sides of the picture) to get it just right.

7. Upload it to Picasa, Photobucket, or your favorite image hosting site, or upload it right into your Squidoo lens!

8. Add the graphic to a webpage using HTML codes. (here's how)

Note to Squidoo users: Squidoo's graphics uploader doesn't support animated graphics. (Sorry, that means no animated lens logos.) For Makesweet's animated banners, you'll have to upload them to Photobucket, Picasa, or another external website.

Mixer: Animated Heart Locket

Here's the index of all Makesweet's photo frames.

A few of my favorites (with my cat as an example image):

Bus Stop Photo Frame

Funny Poster Photo Frame

Picture Frame with stand

Cat Laptop Photo Frame

Teacher Presentation Photo Frame

Couch Potato Photo Frame

Note that for the last one I did a little tweak in Photoshop, because the cat picture was too dark: I selected the cat photo area with the rectangular selection tool and picked "Auto Contrast" under the Image > Adjustments menu.

Also remember that you can load one of these into your graphics program and crop them. So for example you could crop out the sofa and trim it to be just the painting in its frame.

That's only a FEW of Makesweet's Photo Generators. There's lots more!

Loonapix is another place for 3D photo frames, although most of the backgrounds are pretty elaborate. Here's a "Photo Studio" for example:



In addition to the "Photo Effects" frames, which tend to be 3D backgrounds like billboards, beach towels, old west "WANTED" posters, sepia and B&W effects, and/or very elaborate scenes, there are also much simpler Photo Frames that look more like the fancy frames you'd see in scrapbooks or on greeting cards. For example:

"Night Flowers" Fancy Frame

There's a lot of good, interesting 3D frames in the "Other" section of the Photo Frame area of Loonapix.