Simple editing of photos - black and white?

No, not really. Have you tried putting them in flickr and using their photo editor to do it? I think the basic one is free.

Http://www.picnik.com/ is brilliant - it's the same site as the one flickr links to, but if you go direct to piicnil you have more options and can just upload from your computer and save the edited version back there.

Technically you can do it in Paint, just convert to greyscale (IMAGE>ATTRIBUTES>BLACK AND WHITE) but you have to export the image instead of just saving it or it will save it as a .bmp rather than a .jpg or a .gif and those are the formats that you really want the picture in.

As an aside I quite like Paint it's easy to use and does a lot more than people think

Piknik (sp? I can't see the above post!) yes, that's what I was thinking of. I access it from Flickr but I didn't know you could access it separately.

It's worth remembering that the best B&W conversion are not simple greyscale conversions, which can come out looking quite flat and dull. I'm sure how piknik does it but you may find it has a better result than just converting it in e.g. paint.

Incidentally, GIMP is an open source (i.e free) photo editing programme that has many of the same features as photoshop. It will have a bit of a learning curve so may not be appropriate for this but may well be good for the future?

Thanks everyone, photobox has finally done one picture, so I'll try a couple more. They actually use picnik, so it must just be that the version on their website is particularly slow. I think I'll sign up for the full version.

It doesn't have to cost anything - you can sign up for free (or not sign up at all) and use many more features than via the 3rd parties.

Picasa does lots of footery little things with one button.

Picasa is brilliant - and free!

http://picasa.google.co.uk/