Welcome! This week’s post has short summaries of new tools I’ve recently found useful. I’ve now published 50 of these weekly posts here since beginning this sharing project early in the pandemic. Thanks for joining me on this journey and for reading and sharing these posts. - Jeremy
Air 📸
Dropbox and Google Drive are fine for basic file sharing. But if you work with lots of images, Air has some nice features and a more user-friendly interface. I’ve still got photos in way too many places, and rely most on Google Photos, but I’m finding Air useful for organizing, searching and sharing images efficiently.
Automatic image recognition and smart tags mean you don’t have to manually label all your pictures. A couple of nice new features: saving various versions of images and the ability to invite others to comment on an image. Here’s an example of a board I created for gifs of useful tools in action.
Uppbeat 🎶
Download free music for anything you’re creating—a video, podcast, slideshow, presentation, whatever. The catalog is neatly organized by mood. You can also search for things by song duration. That helps if you want something to fit in a short presentation or social media video. A free account lets you download 10 tracks a month. Premium is $7 a month. For 50+ other sources for free or low-cost music—a Google Doc: bit.ly/freemuzic
Can you think of someone who might like one of these tools?👇Thanks for sharing
Tally 📋
An awesome new free survey creation tool. It feels like you’re editing a Google Doc. Easy. Start with a template— for things like event registration or feedback— or a blank form. I still like Typeform, for these reasons. And Google Forms is fine, even if visually dull. But Tally is a great new free option. Here’s a 👀 peek at Tally in action: share feedback on Wonder Tools newsletter 👈
𐬺 Little things I like❤️👇
Guess someone’s views. Longwave is a terrific free little adaptation of the hit board game Wavelength. The gist: try to predict a partner’s view of something. Found this via @JasonShen. He explained the game in his newsletter post here.
Get feedback on an email. Email Reviews gives you human feedback on an email you’re working on. Free, or pay $9 for a rush review or $39 for editing. Send your email to free@emailreviews.co
Animate an old family photo. I’m impressed with MyHeritage’s nostalgia engine. Upload an old photo and get a super-realistic moving image back.
Visit France’s Louvre from home. Take a break & explore some of the 480,000 pieces of art the Louvre offers free online. 🧑🎨🖼
What site/app has been useful for you lately? Add your link to this new discussion thread.
Catch up with Recent Posts 👇
🐣 Useful free lists and apps for Twitter
🎨 Tools I use to run the Journalism Creators Program
⏳ Tools for staying focused, including some great books
🚀 How Reddit can be useful in surprising ways, especially for exploring new ideas
👉 … More past posts on useful sites here
Jeremy, your list of free and low-cost music for audio and video projects is terrific, and I'm about to share it with my students. But did you want to make it so that anyone with the link can edit? I'm going to give them a link that won't allow them to accidentally alter it.