Congratulations to Crazydream12 for winning this month’s Flickr Picnikers Award for Best Use of Text! Her photo, titled “Lets Go“, wins her one full year of Picnik Premium! The two runners up, “Gravity“, by Megan on the train and “He definately loves me…” by Caz, both win three-month Picnik Premium subscriptions! Congratulations and well done to everyone who entered the contest!

We’re sure Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, will have the subject of the next contest announced in a matter of days, so keep checking back with the Flickr Picnikers Group!

Our fourth Featured Picniker is Jordan Stubbs, a 15-year old high school student living in central Georgia. With his dad in the air force, Jordan has lived all over the world, including Guam, Australia, and Germany. He’s first chair alto sax in the school band, is an AP student, and a committed Picnik user. Obviously he’s going places.

We first noticed him on Flickr, where his Picnik-tagged photos started quickly piling up. Then we noticed him participating in our Flickr Picnikers group’s contests, and we noticed, “This kid’s really good!” Especially considering his first Picniked photograph was only added to Facebook on May 28. The way he uses the full range of Picnik tools, from the Effects to Text, Shapes, and Frames, demonstrate he can use Picnik based on the needs of an individual photo, creating a body of work that’s incredibly diverse and creative. He also takes the most wonderful photos of his little sister, which just melts our sibling-hearts. The fact that he’s been doing this for such a short time only makes him more worthy of being featured, since he’s walking proof of how easy it is to achieve photo editing awesomeness even for someone without a lot of photography experience using Picnik for the first time. Plus he’s hilarious. Another perfect candidate for Featured Picniker!

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Monica, Jonathan and Charlie were in San Francisco over the weekend for the annual BlogHer Conference. Designed to create opportunities for women bloggers in areas of education, community, exposure and economic empowerment, this year’s BlogHer Conference has scheduled sessions focusing on MommyBlogging, Green/Social Change and Food, Race and Gender, the Commercial Momosphere, War & Peace, and photography (sponsored by Picnik!).

One attendee and weekend recipient of a free Picnik Premium membership, Ohmommy, is giving away two free year-long subscriptions to Picnik Premium! Just leave her a comment before Wednesday night!

Meanwhile, for all you bloggers who couldn’t make it to San Francisco and see our press pack, Picnik has all sorts of tools designed to making your photoblogging as seamless and awesome as possible. For instance, here is a plug-in that integrates Picnik into Movable Type, and one that integrates Picnik into Wordpress, plus Picnik supports sending photos to a number of blogging platforms via the “Email to Web Site” feature in the Save and Share tab, including such useful places as TypePad, Tumblr, Windows Life Spaces and LiveJournal. Plus there’s the “Other” option for others like Blogger!

There are also some handy browser plug-ins, such as the Firefox extension bloggers have made so popular, to make editing images on the web (even screenshots of whole web pages!) incredibly convenient.

And for those bloggers who haven’t yet harnessed the power of Picnik, some features commonly used by other bloggers are Resize, Crop, Drop Shadow, Frames, and of course Text!

Since launching back in early December, our relationship with Flickr has been a gigantic success, with Flickrites tagging hundreds of thousands of their photos with “Picnik”, the Flickr Picnikers group getting huge with tips, sharing, and contests, and even our very own Southern Hemisphere Branch Office to manage all this thrilling growth. And starting today, Picnik in Flickr is getting even better! After uploading photos to Flickr, you’ll now see a new Save and Edit button which lets you quickly and easily edit a whole basket full of photos as you upload them, without having to go back and forth into Picnik for each shot.

This kind of set editing is designed to streamline the upload and edit experience for all Flickr users, and after yet another record-breaking weekend, we’re all giddy about delivering these new Basket Technologies™ to all our millions of users, first on Flickr and then (soon!) beyond!

We’re experiencing a few problems right now. One of our service providers, Amazon Web Services, has gone offline. That means that Picnik is operating slower than normal and you may have a some difficulties saving. We’re working hard to get things back to normal, we expect to be back to full speed soon.  

UPDATE: We’re back! We apologize for the interruption.  Happy Picniking! 

Team Picnik is headed to BlogHer down in SF! BlogHer is just what the title suggests - a place for (mostly) female bloggers to hang out with one another, and share some laughs, advice, tips, and great stories. We love bloggers and we’re incredibly grateful for what the blogging community has done for Picnik. We’ve posted a new version of our media/kit reviewer guide for bloggers to http://press.picnik.com. Hopefully, if you’re a blogger, you’ll find the blogging tips and tricks useful. (BTW, that’s me with my dog Franklin - who just happens to be my favorite black and white Spaniel!)

Today is Bastille Day, the Fête Nationale of France, and to help all our users, French and otherwise, celebrate liberté, egalité, fraternité, and really great cheese, we have a whole new set of French-themed Bastille Day Shapes!

A writer and editor for over a decade, Ariel Meadow Stallings is the author of a book called Offbeat Bride: Taffeta Free Alternatives for Independent Brides, the editor of offbeatbride.com maintains a blog at electrolicious.com, and manages a local semi-regular literary event called Salon of Shame, where Seattlites gather to drink and exploit their younger selves by reading from their worst adolescent writing: middle school diaries, high school poetry, etc.

Originally from Bainbridge Island, Ariel grew up in a log cabin and studied Sociology and Communications at the University of Washington. She has written up and down the Left Coast, crafting articles for San Francisco-based feminist zines and Amazon.com reviews and several things in between. She’s been on The Today Show, she works at Microsoft three days a week taking pictures of cool employees, and she has bright pink hair tips.

Since she’s mostly a casual photographer who does other things for a living, we thought she’d be a great choice for Featured Picniker, to showcase how great casual pictures can look with just one or two Picnik Effects. And because four of us in Team Picnik are getting married this summer (that is, two of us are getting married to another two of us), who better to feature than an offbeat bride?

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Ariel: Picnik was recommended to me by a friend last fall, but it wasn’t until it was integrated with my beloved Flickr that I really started playing with it.

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Team Picnik get a lot of feedback, but it’s not always just feature requests. A lot of it just makes us smile. When these feedbacks come in, Kristi and Ali, our Picnik Community Therapists, like to spread these warm-fuzzies by sharing with the whole team, and a few of those we thought were featuring even further…

me encanta este programa! me lo recomendo una amiga y sin saber como funcionaba ni nada ya he hecho mis primeros collages!!! me gusta mucho y no puedo dejar de usarlo!! muchos besos no cambieis!! -palomuxi

An excelant program,as a pensioner and only take a few photos I think its marvellous. -F Glover

oMG! I really love it!and I mean “LOVE” it!! I’m having troubles editing my pictures “I sucked, really”.. i don’t know what to do.. untill I asked my sister about it “how can i edit my photos like a pro?” and she gave me this site and whoalla boom!!!Its so awesome!! Brilliant!! I don’t know what to do now without PICNIK.. God bless the mastermind of this site and thank you so much!!

Hello everyone! I’m Alastair Sutherland, the newest engineer at Picnik. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be working here: surrounded by smart and interesting people, far from a corporate monolith, and working on a program that people regularly tell us has changed their life. What’s not to love about that?

First order of business: PayPal! There’s been a growing chorus of requests from Picnikers, saying “If only you accepted payments through PayPal, I’d be a Premium customer today!” And who are we to say no?

So after a few weeks of playing in PayPal’s sandbox (yes, they really do have one! All us kids go there to learn how to trade play money for play goods & services) we’re all set. Everything is built, tested, the wiring’s been stuffed back in the case, and we’re all good to go.

Now, if you’re someone who values the security and convenience that PayPal offers, there’s now nothing keeping you from all Picnik has to offer.