Richard's Online Journal

Greetings and salutations. In case you were wondering, Richard Cobbett is a writer and journalist and producer of many other things involving words. He likes cats, hates spiders, and plays a lot of games. This is his website...

[04/06/08] Flickr Picnik

Flickr really is a great service. I don’t use it for photo sharing particularly, mostly because a) my amateurish photos aren’t worth sharing, and b) last time I tried it, I got pig-sick with the group comment spam. No, I don’t want to join ‘People Who Took A Photo Of A Hedge Once’. Go away. And you, Captain Annotation. Well done. You identified a pigeon. May you have a long and happy life. Go tag yourself.

Still, that was then, this is now. After a year and a bit with Smugmug, I’ve moved back in with a fresh account - not because I had any complaints, it’s a great service, but for the extra speed and wider range of services built on Flickr that I can play around with at my leisure. Extra services… like this:

Touching up ladies of the night in Las Vegas.

Despite being yet another application that can’t spell its own name, Picnik is terrific. It’s an image editor, available on its own, or integrated into the Flickr interface. Amusingly, the latter is the most advanced version, due to not showing adverts and allowing you into fullscreen mode without paying the yearly subscription fee. Probably shouldn’t mention that, just in case it’s a mistake.

Oh well.

Picnik’s one of the two online image editors worth playing with; the other being the sleeker but less powerful Adobe Photoshop Express. The others are too slow, too lacking in features, or have names I can’t remember. Either of these two though, they’re both damn useful. I own Photoshop proper, but it’s locked to one of my PCs due to its product activation system, and in any case, it’s overkill for most photo edits. Sharpen, straighten, fix the colours, pop the colours, fix the shadows. Bish, bash, bosh.

Tabs doesn’t play your LOLCat games…

Having all the important tools built into Flickr itself is a great help, letting me just upload photos straight off my camera and edit them wherever I happen to be. Might still need to pay up to get access to the levels control, but that’s about the only thing missing from the free version. Other than that, it’s fast, effective, and works well. Hurrah! I approve.

Not that I’m getting rid of my Photoshop disc any time soon, of course. Not for a couple of years, at least. Not while there’s blackmail material still to make.

<< Replay: Mass Effect

Steven Moffat's Fearatorium >>

I have Photoshop Elements for OS X but if this is integrated directly into the Flickr interface it sounds like it might be worth a look. Thanks for the heads up :)

Posted by Xenon on Wednesday 4th June

It is. Any image you upload has an ‘Edit Image’ button at the top of the screen. Click it and the Flickr-branded version of Picnik loads right up.

When you’re done, you can save the result over the original if you’ve got a Pro account, or save it as a new image. No leaving Flickr needed.

(It can take some time to load the Picnik interface, since you still need to download the high-resolution version of the shot, but it’s very quick when it’s up on the screen)

Posted by Richard on Wednesday 4th June

Cool, I’m going to London tomorrow and I’ll be taking a few photos so it’ll give me a chance to try it out.

Posted by Xenon on Wednesday 4th June