Google recently announced that they are taking over Picnik a website which allows online editing and formatting of images. The first reaction was why does Google want to do this when they already have Picassa. Picassa is actually not a online image editor but installed on the computer. I thought I would look at Picnik and share with readers what I liked about it.
Picassa web albums is a Google product and its main competitor is Flickr. I am sure many amongst you must have used Flickr a lot more than Picassa web albums.
- One key factor for Flickr being a hit amongst people uploading pictures online is there is no need for installing any application on the computer for editing the images.
- If you have decent internet speed; one would be tempted to just upload images and edit them with a good editor available online.
- That is what Picnik is for Flickr. It is the image editor for Flickr. I wonder what will Google do with Picnik as now it owns the image editing service for Yahoo’s Flickr.
About Picnik
- Picnik is a pretty good image editor and it is quite handy if you want to do some basic editing of images.
- There is no need for registering or signing-up. You can directly edit images from Flickr, Picassa, Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket and more.
- I could also edit an image directly from my hard drive of which I took a screen shot for giving you a better idea of its features.
- It supports Resizing, Cropping, Rotate, setting exposure of a image, colors and sharpening images. It’s Red-Eye correction tool is also very satisfactory which is a must for any online photo storage service.
- I liked the speed with which it worked and that is something I guess a very strong selling point for Picnik.
Screenshot of using Picnik Editor…
So do you think but taking over Picnik, Google has threatened Yahoo’s Flickr? Will Google’s Picassa web albums get better integration than Flickr is getting with Picnik? I think with this buy, Google is tying up loose ends for Chromium OS. If ever we have a Chromium Netbook; services like Picnik will be quite vital. What do you think? Do drop in your comments.
4 Comments
Hey Aditya!
You banged on the right nerves. Picnik, is in my opinion a backup stand for Google’s next strategy after introducing Google Buzz which would not exactly to make trouble clouds for flickr but may be some better options for online photo sharing community. Yahoo is pretty old player in the game too though going smoothly towards disaster, Flickr looks their last successful project and to save flickr from Google’s eye they can go to any extent. We can just interpret and watch!
Well informative article though. Thanks 🙂
I agree Yahoo seems to be going smoothly towards disaster. The point you make of having Buzz allow better photo sharing with picnik is quite interesting. I think that might happen quite realistically.
In my opinion , Picnic is far better than anything i have used so far in my 8 months of blogging . I am a complete noob in photoshop and have no time to learn new . Picnic is cool . Thinking of going to the premium version . Lets see if google makes it all free , it would be great for me
Google buzz is better thanks.With yahoo oh my i wonder what’s going on with them.And oh i came across an online backup called safecopy backup.Wow the review is owesome.I think it will be one of leading online backup system in the near future.