Chrome's inability to set an image as desktop wallpaper is a shortcoming I've harped on before. It's a feature that just about every non-power user I know who tries Chrome wishes was there -- but even at version 8 Chrome still can't do some things that Internet Explorer 6 could. A little while back, the Chrome Pig extension arrived -- finally bringing a third-party solution.

Still, it's a bit more than I wanted. Give me a simple right-click, set-as-wallpaper option. And that's precisely what Mohamed Mansour has done. Witness: the Set image as wallpaper extension for Google Chrome! Right click, set image as wallpaper, and an HTML5 previewer appears so you can eyeball the finished product -- you can even choose to stretch, center, or tile your image. Future versions will include an options page that allows you to skip the previewer and simply perform a two-click image swap.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which OS you use) Mohamed's extension currently only works with Windows. Linux and Mac versions are being worked on.

By the way, there's absolutely no need to panic over MG Siegler's comments on TechCrunch that "someone fed the bloat trolls." Set as wallpaper only uses about 5MB memory -- the same as most other basic extensions. Clearly MG thinks that saving an image, locating it on disk, and then using OS X's built-in controls to set the wallpaper is a much more elegant way to do things.

As for me, I'll take my context menu enhancement, thanks.

TinEye is a slick "reverse lookup" tool that helps you find similar images from a source. It's the kind of thing that would be handy to be able to access from your browser's context menu: see an image you want to search, right click it, and get your results!

Firefox users have been able to add this functionality for a while [addon link], and now Google Chrome users have an option as well. A new extension adds a TinEye-powered 'search similar' entry to your Chrome context menu. You can see it popped up on my glorious foreground image of Earthworm Jim -- and TinEye's bevy of similar images peeking out around the edge.

I can see myself using TinEye reverse search quite often, really -- to find a higher-quality version of an image, for example. It's a welcome power-up for my right clicks.

 

There's a lot of bandwidth being wasted every single second, and Google thinks they've got a pretty snazzy new way to tackle part of the problem. Behold! The new WebP image format!

Following in the freshly-trampled footsteps of its video cousin WebM, Google claims that average savings of about 40% over a comparable JPEG can be achieved. Curiously, the image they chose to provide CNet as an example only saved about half that.

Either way, smaller images filesizes would lead to faster Web page loading times, and a faster Web makes everyone happy, right? There's one downside, however -- encoding in WebP takes about 8 times as long as JPEG. I'm not sure I'd even notice the difference, since eight times the fraction of a second it takes Paint.Net to save a JPEG is still a fraction of a second.

If you find yourself getting all tingly-like waiting to take a look at WebP in action, you won't be waiting long. Google says native support is coming to Chrome "in a few weeks."

Overheard on our team chat: "Anyone remember JPEG2000? Lol."

 

While there aren't really any examples of full-fledged Google Chrome extension apps in the wild yet, there are a few standard Chrome extensions that do some very app-like things. There's ExtensionFM, for example, which I've talked about before, and now there's GooEdit -- which adds basic image editing kung-fu to Chrome.

GooEdit offers a good array of tools. Images can be rotated, flipped, and cropped and color adjustment tools like brightness/contrast and histogram are included. A few effects are available, too, like grayscale, sepia, solarize, and invert. GooEdit can even add or remove noise, sharpen, or blur your selected image.

To launch the editor, simply hold down your alt key and click an image with your right mouse button. When you're all finished, click the disk icon to save and your handiwork is loaded in a new tab -- where you can right-click to save or copy it.

What GooEdit lacks are annotation features (like text and shape tools) and sharing options (though plenty of extensions can already handle this task for you). Hopefully those will be added in future, because they'd make GooEdit even more useful than it already is.
 

Folks like those of us on the Download Squad team might have more use for screenshot tools than some, but they're still incredibly handy from time to time even if you're not blogging or designing. If you spend most of your time in your web browser -- and that browser happens to be Google Chrome -- you might want to check out Awesome Screenshot by the folks behind Diigo.

What makes it awesome? For starters, it can capture both the visible portion of a page or the entire thing -- and scrolling web pages aren't always support by capture tools. It's also got a nice built-in editor which provides all the functions I typically need when cleaning up a screenshot: crop, shape drawing tools, arrows, editable(!) text, and a blur tool for hiding sensitive information.

When you're finished editing, your image is presented on the page and you can save it locally via a right click or upload and share with the push of a button.

Here's my one gripe about the extension: the links it provides are gigantic. Like many tools which upload to pict.com, the URLs Awesome Screenshot spits out are way longer than, say, an imgur or yfrog link. That creates an extra step sometimes if you're pasting a link into apps which don't auto-truncate.

Hopefully future versions will offer a choice of image host -- if so, Awesome Screenshot will be even better than it already is. And it's already pretty dang good.

 

There are still a couple features that keep GMail from "feeling" like a desktop email client, but Google obviously has their sights set on making it perform as much like a native app as possible.

Recently they added drag-and-drop file attachments, and now they've extended that ability to image insertion. Need to remind someone it's peanut butter jelly time? Grab your favorite dancing banana and pull it in to the message window! You'll see a brief animation while your image is uploaded and processed.

Both JPEG and PNG are supported, though you can only drag one image at a time -- at least in my testing. If you've managed to select and drop multiple images, let us know in the comments!