Digital Home Thoughts: Picnik: World's Best Online Photo Editor? Absolutely

"As great as it is, there are times when Photoshop is just plain overkill. Maybe you simply need to nuke some red-eye before emailing a photo, or fix the exposure on a snap you’ve already put on Flickr. Picnik to the rescue! Crop, rotate, resize, one-click fix, color adjustments, sharpening, saturation, even histograms. 95% of the stuff you’d do in Photoshop, you can do in Picnik more easily. Grab photos straight from your Flickr (and replace them with edited versions), from your computer, or the web; send your edited photos to your blog, to email, photo sharing sites, make a nifty slideshow, or even have them printed."



Photojojo, a truly great photo newsletter, highlighted a Web site today that completely blew me away: Picnik. It's a browser-based, Flash-based photo editing tool that is so fast, elegant, and easy to use you quickly forget you're still inside your browser. If you click on logo in the upper left corner, it will go full screen (in IE7 at least) and you'll really think you're using something installed on your computer. I've seen browser-based photo editing sites before, but none have impressed me as much as Picnik.

This is the kind of thing that keeps Microsoft executives up at night: when the browser can be host to applications so powerful no one will need an operating system any longer. I'm not ready to call the time of death for the OS any time soon though, because high-speed-always-anywhere Internet access is still a dream. There are still a lot of limitations: who wants to have to upload 500 MB worth of photos, a process that would take quite some time, before you could start editing them? This certainly shows how powerful a browser-based application can be, and if you're in a situation where you need to edit an image but don't have any software on-hand, Picnik is a great solution.