Three Good Tools for Annotating Images Online

Annotating images can be a good activity for students to do illustrate their understanding of a process by adding information to a blank flowchart. Annotating images is also a good way for students to highlight and identify parts of a diagram like one of a plant cell. I have had students annotate images to identify geological features in images of the Grand Canyon. Here are three tools that your students can use to annotate images online.

OneNote users can annotate images in the web, desktop, and mobile versions of OneNote. You can upload an image to a page in your notebook and then use the drawing and typing tools to write on top of the image. One of the neat things about the web and desktop versions of OneNote is that you can search the web for images right from your notebook.  When using the mobile version of OneNote you can add images by importing them from your phone's camera roll or by taking a new picture with your phone's camera.

Google Keep users can annotate images on their mobile phones and or in the browser-based version of Google Keep. In the browser-based version of Google Keep you have to import images. In the mobile version of Google Keep you can import from your camera roll or take a new picture with your camera. Watch my video below to see how you can annotate images in the browser-based version of Google Keep.



A tool from Classtools called Image Annotator does exactly what it says on the tin. I made the following short video to demonstrate how easy it is to use the Classtools Image Annotator. In the video I demonstrate annotating an image of a map, but you can use it to annotate any PNG, JPG, or GIF image that you have the rights to use.

Pixorize - Free Image Annotation Tool

Pixorize is a free tool for adding interactive annotations to your images. Using Pixorize is a fairly straight-forward process. To get started just upload any picture that you have saved on your computer. (After your image is uploaded you may need to resize it to make it fit into your browser). Once the image is uploaded you can add points, circles, squares, and stars as annotation markers on your image. After adding an annotation marker you can write text to explain the element of the image to which you are calling attention.

To save and or share your work on Pixorize you must create an account. However, creating an account didn't require validating your email address (I created an account with a fake email address that I have for one of my dogs). After saving your image on Pixorize you can share a link to it or embed it in a blog post as I have done below.


Applications for Education
Pixorize is still a new product, but it has great potential as an alternative to Thinglink. You could have students use Pixorize to annotate diagrams, maps, or images like the one in my example featured above.