Picnik: I'm in love

A while ago I stumbled across Picnik. I forget how, but I think it was in a post on Flickr. Having played with it on and off for a while, I recently decided that it was one of the best Web 2.0 (I hate that moniker) applications I've ever used.

It's like that cut-down version of Photoshop (is it called Photoshop Elements? Something like that) that gets bundled with some digital cameras and things - it has a whole bunch of fairly simple tweaks (like adjusting colour and things) to photos, and a whole bunch of slightly more complicated ones, without ever going over the top. But it trumps it by existing as a Flash application in your browser, and by blurring the line between online and offline quite well. Where it excels, though, is where there's any popular online repository of photos with an accessible API. I can use the excellent Picasa to upload a whole load of photos to the PicasaWeb online albums, then hit Picnik, grab them from there, tweak them in any way I need (like maybe scrubbing out serial numbers in screenshots) and then save them back in the web album, or save them directly to Flickr, or Facebook, or Photobucket, or email them around, or (amazingly) even back to the hard drive on my computer.

Being Flash-based it's as cross platform as the Flash player is, and I've run it (slowly) on my (slow) Linux box. It's Flash 9, so the chances of open-source Flash player Gnash making it run are slim-to-none, but there's no way you could get the speed and flexibility with an earlier version of Flash. What's really refreshing is that, despite being a Flash app it all works with the Back button as well, by some clever manipulation of the browser history. (In non-geek words - it just works really nicely.)

Other notable things - one of the ways you can get photos into Picnik is by doing a Flickr or Yahoo image search. This is neat. You can even type a URL straight into Picnik and it will list all the images there, for you to choose from. There are Firefox and (ick) IE extensions to make the acquisition easier still, and this is brilliant for another reason - you can grab the whole webpage as an image this way, which is brilliant for screenshots and things. The screenshot in this post was grabbed like that, unremarkably (seeing as I just mentioned it).

I've been using it as a handy gateway to get pictures from (Google's) Picasa to (Yahoo's) Flickr. Picasa is just about the best photo management program available for Windows, and the Linux version is pretty good to boot (although very obviously not a native app) - but it's unlikely to ever talk to Flickr natively. Although there's no batch way of moving stuff from PicasaWeb to Flickr, for five or six photos at a time it's fine, and gives you a chance to get your tags and comments in order!

It's a fabulous application - they've introduced a paid-for version which has a bunch of extra effects, but the free version has all the abilities I've mentioned (and more - I've just not used them!). It ties into Flickr and Picasa through legal use of APIs, so you're not giving passwords to unknown third parties to achieve the interoperability. It oozes professionalism from the offset. It is, in short, really really nice. Nice enough for me to love it; and not in secret, but to profess my love of it.