Have you tried Picnik? It’s a great online tool for editing your pictures from various online services such as Flickr. It should definitely go on your list of Web 2.0 tools in your toolkit. And best of all, it is free for the basic services (which are plenty) and is only $24.95/year for the premium services. Here are a couple of posts about Picnik that I’d written previously, that explain all the features.

And now they are offering new shapes, fonts and borders for free, for the holidays. Read about it here, then check it out at Picnik.

Create Your Holiday Greetings with Picnik! Available for FREE immediately, Picnik offers you a fabulously fun and easy way to create holiday greetings. Use a new library of awesome holiday shapes, new fonts, and custom borders to creatively turn any of your photos into a smashing holiday greeting. Then use Picnik to print or email directly to your friends and family. The combinations are endless. Unleash your inner Santa! Check it out now at www.picnik.com. Start Picniking! Help spread the word, share this email with a friend!   New Holiday Features: • Santa hats! • Holly borders • Beautiful ornaments • Gorgeous gifts and bows • Holiday stickers • Christmas stockings • Holiday stamps • Snowflakes galore • 8 new holiday fonts and much more! Happy Holidays! Team Picnik — Mike, Darrin, Jonathan, Peter, Brian, Justin, Monica, Steve, and Charlie

1932 1st Ave Suite 716

Seattle, WA 98101

blog.picnik.com

www.picnik.com

~Susan Mellott

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Not too long ago, I wrote a post about Picnik - A Cool Free Tool to Edit Your Online Pictures. At the time, Picnik was allowing users to try out their premium tools for free. I just got an update from Picnik and they have officially launched their premium tools so they are not free anymore, but they are reasonable for the features you get and very much in line with the charges that most online Web 2.0 tools have if you want to upgrade beyond their basic services.

They charge $24.95 per year for the premium package. As a sample comparison, Flickr also charges $24.95 per year if you want to show more than 200 pictures. As a matter of fact, most of the ‘free’ web 2.0 tools have a charge beyond their basic services, which are probably not adequate if you really use them. I have a post in the works about some of the “hidden” costs of “free” web 2.0 tools. (stay tuned)

In any case, Picnik is a very nice online picture editing tool with lots of neat features for free and many more advanced editing features for a very reasonable $24.95 per year.

Here is the update I received from Picnik:

Holy Hannah, a lot has happened in the seven months since our last email: Picnik has gone big time, with more than 2.3 million visitors, rave reviews everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the BBC World News, a partnership deal with Flickr (more to come soon!) and the launch of Picnik Premium. Start Picniking! Help spread the word, share this email with a friend!

Look at what Picnik Premium can do: And that’s just a taste! Only $24.95USD a year. That’s, like, 12 quid!

	Since our last email, we’ve been busy with the additions and now Picnik offers 26 effects, 5 frames, a totally new touch-ups section, and nearly 200 fonts and shapes! We’ve added Facebook, Photobucket and Webshots to the list of sites you can open, save and share to, and our integration with Flickr is about to get a whole lot better (stay tuned!). We will of course continue to offer a great set of editing features free, but for full access to the oodles of tools, effects, shapes, fonts and frames, you can sign up for Picnik Premium. It’s only $24.95 a year (that’s less than one latte a month!), and is absolutely the best photo editing value anywhere. We’d also like to thank all our early users, beta testers, bug reporters, criticism senders, fan mailers, Facebook hordes, and word-spreaders who have helped us get to this point. You’re the best a company like ours could have hoped for, and we’re looking forward to continuing to provide you with the very best photo editor out there. Happy Picniking! Team Picnik — Mike, Darrin, Jonathan, Peter, Brian, Justin, Monica, Steve, and Charlie

1932 1st Ave Suite 716

Seattle, WA 98101

blog.picnik.com

www.picnik.com

~Susan Mellott

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I have just gone on vacation for 10 days in Florida visiting my sister and my mom. So I thought I would try an experiment where I would do online updates like twitter, only using photos in Flickr.

Now, if I had a fancy phone I could do it through the internet, but I don’t (if you can get to the internet, you can use mobile flickr website).

But I am still emailing pictures from my phone. I found some instructions here on flickr and wasn’t sure if I could do it but it was just a matter of getting an email address for my account (which I can view or edit through my account page on Flickr and then the email tab). Then I just take a picture on my phone camera and email it to my flickr email which posts it right on Flickr. My phone is old but it still have a ’send pix message’ which makes it especially easy and I saved the email address in my phone’s phonebook so I can just pick it when I want to email.

I can also add a message (my phone text messaging skills are poor to say the least, but I can do it - at least if I have my reading glasses on ). And you can set it in Flickr to add certain tags to any email pictures. You can also use tag keywords in your message but I try to minimize my texting through my phone so I just set up some defaults on Flickr.

It is surprisingly easy and fun. The one thing it does not do is have a way to send your emailed pictures to a set, but I just move them there when I get on the computer next.

This is my true “flittr” experiment since it is real time updating. You can go to my Flickr account to see my pictures and see it being updated.

And I will be taking pictures with my Kodak digital camera, my palm pilot and my web cam and posting them to my flickr account at mellottrobinson. I’ll put them in a set called Florida October 2007.

I’m not sure what access I will have to wifi/internet (my sister has wifi but it is locked and she isn’t sure she remembers the password) but I will do the best I can to post my digital pictures as my vacation progresses. The phone pictures are easy!

My husband didn’t come with me so it will be a good way for him to see what all I am doing and seeing.

I have always thought that there needed to be a way to “flittr” since I use twitter and flickr both regularly and combining the two seems like a great idea.

So keep an eye on my Florida October 2007 set and you can see my vacation as it unfolds (it is probably not that interesting but if you do it, it would be interesting to you and your family and friends) and maybe it will spark an interest in you to do the same.

~Susan Mellott

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Thanks to a tweet on twitter (unfortunately I can’t seem to go back and look at all older posts from everyone I follow so I can’t give them credit), I found out about a great new online tool for photo editing called Picnik. Picnik is a free online tool that allows you to edit your online pictures from Flickr, Picasso Web Albums, facebook or photobucket. Or you can upload a picture from your computer, edit it and save it to any of the above.

It has auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure (including advanced setting like shadows, contrast, highlights, histogram, brightness and more. Note: these may be premium settings). You can edit the color (saturation and temperature) and sharpen it or fix red-eye.

It displays all your pictures from the online photo album of your choice. I use Flickr so I could see all my pictures, or I could see all the pictures in each set. It also shows an “order by” dropdown and a search text but neither of these worked for me. Maybe it depends on the online photo place you are reading from.

You can select a picture and edit, delete, email, rename, save to or open the flickr page. When you rename, you can type the new name right there and it will rename it on flickr. You can also search for photos on Yahoo or flickr or grab a picture from your web cam.

They also have premium features that can be used for free this week (being the week of 9/25 I guess, although I checked today, 10/3 and they are still usable for free and at the bottom it says free for this week so I guess through fridayish). They will then cost $24.95 per year.

Update: As of Oct 16, the premium features are still free.

Some of their premium features are on the ‘Create’ tab, which includes free effects like black and white, sepia, boost, soften, vignette, matte, and the premium effects: nightvision, infrared film, lomo-ish, holga-ish, HDR-ish, cinemascope, focal b&w, soften or pixelate, pencil sketch, doodle (write/draw on it), gooify (drag bits arounds) and pixelate.

I really liked the focal effects, which focus on a certain area (you can change the size and move it around) and highlight that area. Here is a picture of my dog, Koshi that I messed around with. Nothing special but you can sort of get the idea.

Here is their release news from 9/25/2007:

Picnik Release 28 / v1.0! (September 25)

“Picnik has officially launched! Today is the day we take our beta banner down and throw it on the ceremonial bonfire. We’re also introducing our Premium Feature Stream which will be available for the super-affordable price of $24.95 for a whole year. This gets you get complete access to special edit tools, effects, shapes, fonts, and a whole bunch more just around the corner. To celebrate, Picnik Premium is free and open for everyone to preview this week! There’s also a ton of new features, so here’s what’s new:

Photobucket Support: Our mission of connecting Picnik to anywhere your photos might be continues and today we add Photobucket to the list of major photo sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Facebook, which you can get photos from or save your photos to!

Effect Painting: Many of you have asked to apply an effect to precise areas of a photo. Now you can with Effect Painting! Choose a Black and White, Sepia, Boost, Soften, Tint, or Pixelate effect and click the new Paint Brush button. You can brush in the original through the effect or check the Reverse effect box to do it backwards: paint in the effect just where you want it.

New Effects: Lots of these! There’s Holga-ish, Night Vision, CinemaScope, Invert, Cross Process, Focal Pixelate, Pencil Sketch, and Pixelate, all under the newly organized Effects section in Create. In fact, the whole Create section has been reorganized, with three new sections…

Shape Tool: Add shapes, symbols, speech bubbles, hearts, arrows, paw prints and the odd spaceship to your photo. You can choose your color, spin it around, make it as big as you want to shape up that shot!

Touch-Ups Tool: Whiten teeth or remove blemishes with these tools. Put your best face forward!

New Frames: We’ve moved Frames to their own section, and have added Museum Matte and Polaroid to the ranks of Border, Rounded Edges, and Drop Shadow.

Stay tuned as we open the floodgates on our Picnik Premium Feature Stream!”

So go check it out and if you hurry, you can try the premium features for free too! At least you could make a couple of cool pictures while it is free.

~Susan Mellott

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I was browsing my Yahoo! News and found this great article from PC World called In Pictures: The Strangest Sights in Google Earth. Check these out!

This is from Alberta, Canada. Doesn’t it look like an American Indian wearing headphones?

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This is a man-made lake near Bauru, Brazil. I wonder who’s idea this was?

Why is that car parked on the side of the building?

Can you believe the detail in this herd of elephants captured by Google Earth in Africa? UPDATE: Well, although this came from the PC World article (go look for yourself) and says “Google’s satellites sometimes catch the Earth’s inhabitants on the move, like these ten African elephants (Google Earth coordinates 10.903497,19.93229)”, people have commented that this was taken by possibly a helicopter (which may be one of the methods Google Earth uses) and that this may be misleading so in any case, according to PC World this is from Google Earth.

Just one of many crop circles. Here is a link to the Google Earth Community Crop Circle Collection.

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Why is a fighter jet parked in a parking lot in a residential neighborhood near Paris?

One Google Earth Community has placemarks for more than 3300 planes in flight, including this World War II bomber, flying over Huntingdon, England.

I really enjoyed these and I hope you do too.

~Susan Mellott

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