I really did not expect online photo editing to ever happen, but Picnik.com has brought online photo editing to the Web as the screenshot attests to. The service is quite good and fast. The latter speed is achieved by using the latest Flash Player. Let me say, as a confirmed Photoshop CS3, Photoshop Elements and PaintShop Pro user I was impressed with the quickness of Picnik – and hence the underlying Flash Player engine.
The other impressive aspect of Picnik was the completeness of the basic photofinishing features. Do not expect to have any masking, layering or image blending features associated with spophisticated desktop photofinishing tools. But there are Crop, Resize, Color Correction, Sharpening, and the requisite red-eye removal tools for basic edits. Add to this are Creative features such as Effects , Shapes, Touch-ups, Frames and advanced feeatures.
If you are willing to pay $25/year the number of creative options are increased notably including making the online ads vanish, fullscreen operations, and more options in general. Picnik.com is able to upload images from your PC or from any of the following online catalog services: Facebook, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Photobucket and Webshots. Users can add or edit images on all of these websites. In addition, if you copy the image location from any web page, Picnik will import it and allow you to save onto your pC the edited image. Very nice. This service is well worth exploring because it gives you a darn good photo editor – anywhere on the net. See the full review of Picnik.com here.
But what will be of interest to Web developers is the fact that Picnik.com can be customized by users and added as a feature to your own websites. Picnik.com provides all the JavaScript and API info required. So in addition to having being able to add a text editor to your website, one can add photofinishing services of very high caliber. This is not to shabby.
Now Adobe is supposed to have its own online edition of Photoshop coming and there are other Flex/Flash based photo editors such as http://www.flauntr.com and http://www.splashup.com and http://www.fotoflexer.com. So the new Flas/Flex/AIR technology is going to be very disruptive – even for Adobe itself.