This is, according to our calculations, Picnik’s BILLIONTH edited photo:
It comes from Gísli Hjálmar, an Icelandic law student working as a technician and one of Flickr’s more prolific Picnikers. To celebrate, and to show him off a bit, we asked him a little bit about himself.
He became interested in photography when he was around 19, but then didn’t take pictures for nearly 20 years before starting up again three years ago.
Two years ago he discovered Picnik, and now does most of his photo editing with us (even though he has Photoshop on his computer). His favorite part of Picnik? The Seasonal Effects! How does he feel about his photo being Picnik’s billionth edited photo? He’s “very happy” and for good reason: Gísli now has a lifetime subscription to Picnik Premium!
Of all the thousands of photos being edited Wednesday morning, we’re so happy that the person with the billionth photo is such an interesting guy, an enthusiastic photographer and a good Picniker! It makes us think about all the millions of interesting people out there with their squillions of interesting pictures using Picnik all the time, and we can’t wait to see what the next billion brings. Thank you all and happy Picniking!
Ding ding ding! Big news here at Picnik World Headquarters! Today our crack team of server specialists cracked open the champagne in their Top Secret Server Lair high above downtown Seattle when the Official Picnik Tally Counter ticked over to one billion photo edits!
To put this into perspective:
One billion seconds: nearly 32 years
One billion minutes ago: Trajan was Emperor of Rome
One billion days ago: Lucy was still alive and well
One billion edits ago: it was October 2007!
To celebrate this HUGE number, Picnik Premium is free for everyone today! So enjoy those Effects, admire all that’s Advanced and go nuts with Seasonal from 9 a.m. today until 9 a.m. tomorrow, February 4th, Seattle time (PST)!
Time’s up! Thank’s so much everyone for helping to make this possible, and many happy Picniking returns!
Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, has started a contest in our Flickr Picnikers group for everyone to look back through their Picniked photos from 2009 and submit the one they think is their best. And instead of the usual contest, three entries will be picked at random for a free month of Picnik Premium!
Have a look at the entries, and to enter your own best of 2009 Picniked photo, set up a Flickr account and join the Flickr Picnikers group!
Our fifteenth Featured Picniker is Brandi Fitzgerald. A native of sunny Boca Raton, Florida, Brandi moved away from home when she was 19, following love and opportunity around the country to Tennessee, North Carolina, and Southern California where for four years she built a successful career in corporate payroll. Then in 2007, she followed her love and dreams to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!
Brandi calls herself a “craftepreneur,” a mix between crafter, artist, photographer and businesswoman. She owns and manages a gallery inside The Piazza at 2nd and Hancock Streets, she teaches classes on digital organization and basic photo editing, she does custom scrapbooks, refinishes and repurposes household furniture and housewares and in her free time still enjoys taking pictures and being crafty! She loves her family, travel, roller skating, board games and cheese. She’s found that with growth and exploration come setbacks and mistakes, but has also found that that’s what life is all about, and that living in the moment, learning from every experience is what makes life so wonderful. And it brought her to Philly, which she loves.
It can be hard to keep up with what’s new here at Picnik. Unlike traditional software companies that put a new box on shelves every 18 months or so, we do updates every week! Sometimes they’re little updates, moving menus around or fixing bugs to make it easier for you to use Picnik, but other times it’s an avalanche of awesomeness. Here’s how you can better keep track of everything we’re up to here at Picnik World HQ:
If you have a Twitter account, and statistically speaking, you do, follow us @Picnik for all the latest feature updates, office shenanigans, promos and freebies, delivered instantly to your timeline.
And don’t forget! If you have any questions or need any help, don’t hesitate to email our intrepid feedbackers at feedback@picnik.com! And of course we always read the comments here on the blog, too. Happy Picniking!
Team Picnik is heading to Sin City this week for the Consumer Electronics Show! Look out for the green grass, fluffy clouds and shining faces of the Picnik Booth in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Kelcey (Junior Designer, Unicorn Enthusiast), Ali (Community Cultivator, QA Deputy) and Michael (Bolognino, Social Marketing Manager, second Michael and first Picnik employee who needs to go by his last name) will be on hand to demo Picnik’s awesomeness, so stop by and say hi!
Also, make sure you catch Picnik CMO and Bullhorn (and mom) Lisa Conquergood on a panel discussion talking about “Moms as Memory Keepers” on Friday at 1:00 pm with Jef Holove of Eye-Fi, Jennifer Smiczek of The Print Shop, Terence Swee of muvee, Neil Yarian of Pandigital, Susan Write of Smilebox and Suzanne Kantra of Techlicious.com moderating.
Out with the old, in with the new! It’s 2010 already: A whole new year, a whole new decade!
Like most things on the internet, there’s not much about Picnik that can really be thought of as old, exactly. But boy do we have new stuff to ring in the new year! We’ve spent all of 2009 churning out new features and functionality to make Picnik even awesomer with Touch-ups, Show, masses of seasonal effects, new shapes and Stickers, new Effects, even new Team Picnik members! So much new for the New Year!
With all this exciting new stuff, Picnik’s at risk of getting a little big, a little heavy, a little rotund. Nearly doubling the amount of features on a site is bound to have an effect on the waistline, but we mustn’t let the holiday excess stay permanent! So our resolution for the new year is to keep Picnik trim, in shape and moving briskly despite all the updates!
What about all you Picnikers? What would you like to see in Picnik in the new year? Let us know! And in the mean time, all of us at Team Picnik wish all of you a very happy and healthy new year!
Christmas is here! We here at Team Picnik will be taking these couple of days off to relax with friends and family, open presents, and eat ridiculous amounts of ham, turkey, potatoes of all kinds, pies, cakes, cookies with powdered sugar and spice, puddings doused in alcohol and lit on fire… The list goes on. And then on Saturday we’ll be uploading all the pictures we’ve taken alongside the millions of other happy Picnikers ready to relive and share their holiday memories!
It’s so easy to turn those photos into memories with Picnik’s Fancy Collages and we’ve added dozens of new themes and patterns. You can get started right from the Welcome Page! Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!
There are just nine shopping days left till Christmas. Barely enough time for most delivery options, unless you want to pay for shipping, and who wants to do that. And then there are the usual complications: Shoe size, sweater color, computer platform, and the most common problem of all: What do you get the person who has everything?
Picnik Premium! A year of Picnik Premium is a whole year of photo editing awesomeness. It encompasses all seasons, it’s never out of date, it runs on any computer, and even if your loved ones already have Picnik Premium, a gift of Picnik Premium can be tacked onto the end of the current subscription period! No fuss, no muss, no shipping! Picnik Premium is always instantly available for last minute stocking stuffing.
What if you’re the one on the receiving end of all this largesse? What if your shoe size is difficult, your preference in sweaters is tricky, and the only thing you could possibly need on the computer, which is leaving a big fluffy cloud-shaped hole in your heart, is Picnik Premium? Then put Picnik Premium on your wishlist this year with our handy Letter to Santa (or Mom, or grandpa, or great uncle Ben) Generator, and bask in the generosity of loved ones.
We here at Picnik are always paying attention to new trends in the internet world. So every year the Google Zeitgeist is of interest to us Team Picnikers. For instance this year, the second fastest rising search term in Food & Drink is “picnic”.
Number 1 on the zeitgeist is “acai berry”, which of course Oprah was big into this year. Number 6 is “peanut butter recall” and boy, do we we remember getting the call from Costco to pack up our precious Clif Bars. So most of the things on this list had some major media event behind it during 2009, except for “picnic.”
We here at Picnik think this is lovely. It could be that “picnic” rising so suddenly in Google searches signifies a return to simple pleasures, time spent with friends and family together, in a field, on a blanket, buttering sandwiches and picking blackberries. We had one or two picnics ourselves during the past year, in fact. Or maybe they just needed a photo editor! Happy Picniking!
