Picnik is beautiful, convenient, and a lot of fun

How to use Picnik in 1 minute:

Also see my extended tour for why I'm enjoying Picnik so much!

I freshly upgraded to a Picnik Premium account. This US$25 investment was a no-brainer, considering how many right things they've got going for them. For one, their website design is exemplary, consistently-themed (grass & skies!), and helps you learn more about — and use! — the product without wasting time. From their uncanny ability to make forms simple and even (gasp!) enjoyable to fill out to how clear they communicate Picnik's benefits, it's a winner all-'round.

Picnik itself is fantastic: totally integrates with Flickr (altho you can upload images from your hard drive and other sources too), the effects enable you to get stunning results in just a few clicks, and it's severely smile-inducing. And especially important to me is the convenience of being able to "pop" or enhance an image within minutes, or even seconds, without wasting time downloading and re-uploading — that's a chief strength over any offline image editor, and I bet it'll be a big market strength in time to come.

I hope they add some more useful tools soon to keep pace with/beat other contenders in the field: I'm in want of a selective fade edges option.

I've tried other web image editors but I found their rough edges led them to far be less satisfying than Picnik, which reinforces to me that aesthetics & finely-tuned attention majorly count when it comes to a richer, better user experience.

I'm starting to recommend Picnik to Second Life photographers, particularly newer ones who are curious how to get great post-process effects without spending a lot of money or time. Picnik makes it that much more accessible, and while it's inevitable some snobs will decry it as a "toy", consider how many great achievements begin with play, and here's an easy, rewarding learning curve which bypasses frustration almost entirely.

Also after I made the video, I found I didn't need to relogin to Picnik via Flickr, and it had saved my Premium status. Not sure why it happened before, but chalk another plus point. More companies should follow Picnik's lead — did I mention I had a lovely time with their customer support too? Yes.

Tagged as: General, The Web, Video