Life may be no picnic, but maybe Picnik will soon enrich your life!
Thank you, thank you, I actually worked on that first sentence for the better part of an hour. Now on to that magical service called Picnik.
Basically, Picnik is an online photo editor, which is a good thing for everyone who doesn’t want to buy Photoshop or install The Gimp, or for those who like to edit their pictures after they’ve already been uploaded. Colour settings, cropping, special effects – Picnik has it. The thing that makes it really usable is that it lets you import your images from your Flickr account (or just search for any photo on Flickr), from any website or simply from your computer.
The whole interface is done in Flash, which makes it pretty versatile and fast. And it looks pretty too! See for yourself:
Here’s the view when you edit an image:
You can then either save the edited photos directly back into your Flickr account, create funky little slideshows, email them to some address or to a website or send the pretty little thing off to the printers:
One little detail I think is clever: You can automatically add the “picnik” tag to edited photos when saving it back to Flickr. That’s quite handy when you want to see the ones you’ve edited online, and it’s a good way for the service itself to get attention.
Picnik reminds me of of this one service called Preloadr, which does most of the things Picnik does, only that it’s limited to Flickr (as the name already implies). The upside to less features is clearly that it’s really a lot more lightweight, and does without the use of a Flash interface.