Online Photo Editing Tools from Google - Picnik!

Posted on March 29, 2007 at 11:13 am

If Adobe was looking forward to releasing their online version of Photoshop to edit pictures online, they got beat to the punch by Picnik! Picnik is a free online photo editor created by the Google Code project. It’s got a slick Web 2.0 interface and has a fair amount of features considering it’s still in beta.

Picnik lets you get photos from just about anywhere (computer, Picasa, Flickr, Yahoo, another web site, web cam) and load them into the software for editing. It has the basic editing tools along with some fun creative tools. Here’s an overview of the software.

Once you create an account and sign in, you’ll be on the main tab, called Photos. There are four main tabs to Picnik: Photos, Edit, Creative Tools, and Save and Share. We’ll go through each one of these tabs.

First on the photos tab is where you’ll pull in your photos from any source that you want. I have my photos in Picasa, so from the top menu, I chose Picasa Web Albums. You also have the options of Get From Computer, Get From Web Site, Yahoo Search, Flickr Search, and WebCam Photo.

To get access to your Picasa photos, simply click the Authorize Picnik button in order to allow Picnik to access your Google Picasa web albums.

Click Grant Access on the next screen and Picnik is now connected to your Web Albums! It’s that easy and now you’ll be able to edit photos online without having to use the Picasa desktop software.

You’ll be brought back to the Photos tab and after a little bit of time (I had over 280 albums, so it took about 4 to 5 minutes to connect and get a listing of all my albums), you’ll see your albums in a combo box on the right.

Choose any album from the list and all the photos will show up below as thumbnails. The only problem I can see so far in the beta is that it takes a good amount of time to load the pictures initially. I had to wait about 3 minutes before the pictures showed up from my selected album. Now to edit any picture, click on the picture and there is a small button to the right of the picture with a down arrow.

Click Edit from the list and you’ll be brought to the editing tab showing that picture. Across the top are the options for editing to the picture (Auto-Fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen, and red-eye):

The editing interface is very clean and very quick in terms of response. It seems like you are working on a desktop application. The program has unlimited Undo, so you can make 100 changes and revert all the way back to the original.

If you want to do some more creative stuff with your picture, click on the Creative Tools tab and the current picture will automatically be loaded there. There are a wide range of effects that you can use and they will be adding a bunch more later, so keep an eye out!

The feature I liked the best was the Gooify, which caused great greif to my cousin as you can see from below!

And lastly, with the Save & Share tab, you can take your edited photo and save it back to Picasa web albums, email the photo to someone, save it to your computer, create a Flickr slideshow, email to a web site (such as MySpace), or print it!!! That’s a lot of options!

The program will be adding more features soon, so once it’s out of beta it might give the Adobe people something to worry about! The integration works really well, espcially if you’re using Picasa and Flickr! The only thing you need is Flash 9 player! Enjoy!

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