I own a Canon digital SLR and four digital point and shoots of various brands. I read dpreviews religiously. I almost never leave the house without a camera, not counting the one built into my cell phone. I also have an adorable 21 month old daughter. If you guess that I take lots of photos each week (each day, really), you'd be right.

Now, I'm NOT an amateur photographer. I don't have an artsie bone in my body and I have no idea how to take the kind of artistic photos that people display proudly on their web pages. My photos are simply snapshots. I just want to capture the special moments with my family, especially the baby, or friends, and be able to share them with other folks, either online or physically through Christmas cards, prints, albums, posters, and so forth. Oh, and maybe have them printed on knick-knacks like mugs and shirts.

To be honest, most of my photos can use some editing. One of my biggest faults is that I don't focus in on the subject as much as the photography books say that I should. Partly because it's hard to stay zoomed into an extremely mobile toddler, but part of it is that I tell myself with so many megapixels, I can always crop out the excess later. Better to have extra stuff in the photo then to lose something I may want later. But with so many photos coming out of the camera, I don't really ever get around to editing any of them - unless I need one for a special occasion like a card or something.

I can could use some help creating cool stuff out of these photos. Two winters ago, I wanted to send out a photo collage with our family Christmas newsletter, because I couldn't decide which *one* of my thousands of photos to make a photocard with. I didn't want a collage that was a boring rectangular grid, but something that looked more artistic to impress my friends, though I wasn't motivated enough to actually go buy a collage software. :) I looked on the web and didnt see any good free ones - so I tried making one myself in Microsoft Office. Boy, was that a mistake. About five hours later, I ended up with a rectangular 2x4 grid of photos and called it quits...

I'm a R&D project manager here at HP Labs, and I work with a bunch of smart researchers who work on some pretty neat technologies to make it easier to work with digital media like photos and videos. We thought it'd be cool to share some of this work with the world, so we created this site called Snapfish Lab. This is a technology demo site where you can see some of the research being done here at HP Labs, and at the same time you can use some of these tools on the photos in your Snapfish account - thus the name 'Snapfish Lab'.

We're launching Snapfish Lab with six initial tools, and we'll be updating the site periodically with new tools. There's some neat stuff to check out. I've been using the horizon alignment tool to fix those crooked landscapes that I seem to have a talent for taking, and last Christmas, the graphics for my family Christmas photocard was made by the same Poster Creator tool you see on this site.

Now, some caveats... The tools on Snapfish Lab are early peeks of research & development efforts - meaning that they are quite not ready for prime time. To you, the user, that means that you may experience annoyances from time to time - thus the 'Beta' next to our logo. So please excuse the faults, though we would very much like to hear about them so we can work on improving them. On the bright side, we don't have any annoying ads on the site. :) And the Snapfish Lab site is *not* the same as the regular Snapfish site - any annoyances you see on this site are our responsibilities and has nothing to do with the good folks at Snapfish or the fabulous service that they run.

So please give the site a spin at http://www.snapfishlab.com. Let us know what you like or don't like. Or if you have ideas for some tool that can scratch that photo itch you've always had, let us know! We'll see what we can do. :)

Thanks and till next time.

Jerry