That’s right, people. It’s greeting card season.

If your fingers are cowering in your pockets for fear of paper cuts, cramping, and ink poisoning, then it’s time to coax them out! This year holiday cards no longer require stacks of envelopes, semi-current address books, or a bucket of stamps…

Fancy Collages to the rescue!

Spare your fingers, save yourself the cash, and earn your Earth-friendly merit badge this holiday season. Go green with Picnik and send your holiday greeting cards digitally! It’s the easiest way to say you’ve gone green without ruining your bumper.

Check out the customizable designs in the Start menu under the Library tab. Enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! For those of you who have been curious about all the turkeys and pilgrim hats, pies and cornucopias in our Shapes section, today is the day where the entirety of the US (except the poor grocers) takes the day off and to celebrate the bounty of the New World, stuff themselves with turkey dinners and pie. And then tomorrow, the day after Thanksgiving, we take another day off, and go shopping!

That’s right, the Friday after Thanksgiving is lately becoming commonly known as “Black Friday”, and not because of the mall traffic: the Christmas shopping season is when most retailers finally go in the black. In these trying economic times, of course, consumers are looking for smart, intelligent, perhaps even environmentally friendly, possibly even free alternatives for the usual holiday giving options.

If you feel like this describes you, Team Picnik Members will be downtown Seattle tomorrow handing out free Picnik Premium Samples! Look for us around 4th and Pine in among the crowd gathering to watch the lighting of the Christmas tree and Macy’s star!

Another dose of the warm fuzzies via Ali and Sonia, our Picnik Community Therapists, from some of our users. This installment is a mega-super-deluxe version, just in time for the long holiday weekend. We love hearing from you guys, so if you have anything to add, make sure to hit the Feedback button at the top of the Picnik window!

I love picnik.com
Picnik.com is a wonderful website in which normal people,without bein members, can come and edit there pictures or as i like to say beautify.
Picnik.com is a wonder place and better than Fotoflexer and LunaPic combined.
Thank u picnik for making my life easier.

I’ve been using your free version for the last few weeks, editing a whack-load of vintage photos for Geni.com. This morning, I logged on to find that I can now upload 5 photos at a time!!! Awesome and thank you!! Even better, your software is now remembering which folder to take from and which folder to put the finished photos back into on my computer. What a time saver. Smooch the designer who came up with this for me, please. :-) It’s working absolutely perfect. :-)

Collage Feature
Thank You. My partner and I have been wishing and hoping for the last few months that you would magically add a diptych/quad/triptych etc feature. And you did it. You are now, officially the bomb-diggidy of all post production programs. We are entirely thrilled with your presence and look forward to more premium features.
You’ve have gained members for life here in Petaluma, CA.
Thanks again Picnik, you seriously rock….

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Our ninth Featured Picniker was discovered in our Flickr group, where his vivid, lavishly textured photos of street scenes in some unknown European capital quickly caught our eye. It turned out he’s Robert Kruyskamp, in Den Haag (The Hague), seat of the government of the Netherlands, home of the Dutch monarch, location of the International Criminal Court, center for all foreign embassies and government industries in the country, Europol, and the Escher Museum. Not a bad place to have a camera in!

Currently working in the hospitality industry, Robert describes himself as “Caffeinated Shooter,” and his Twitter feed is full of reports of shooting assignments, espresso drinks, and trying to get some sleep.

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Today Picnik announced that we will be working through NetHope to make Picnik Premium available for free to more than 300,000 people who work for humanitarian and conservation organizations around the world. You can read more about this announcement here.

The goal is simple: We want to give the people who are on the front lines of solving problems in the developing world whatever help we can to communicate the importance of the work they’re doing. I’ve been working with NetHope’s senior team for more than a year now, and recently returned from a week-long summit at Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. In attendance were CIOs and CTOs from the 25 member organization (CARE, Save the Children, Mercy Corps, The Nature Conservancy, Ashoka, etc.), and representatives from leading tech companies, including Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, and Accenture.

For all of us, the goal is audacious and deceptively simple: How can we harness the power of technology to make a positive difference in the developing world? NetHope serves as a point of connection to bring the people and organizations together who are on the front lines, working to answer this question.

Ideally, Picnik’s contribution will give nonprofit field workers even more incentive to capture and share images of the work they’re doing so that all of us can better understand their challenges and provide the support that’s needed. It’s also Picnik’s way of saying thank you to a committed group of people for all the wonderful, crucial work you do.

Full disclosure: I can’t grow a beard. I really can’t blame genetics, my grandfather could grow a beard, if my father wished to stay clean shaven he’d have to shave twice daily, even my younger brother can grow and impressive manly beard. And after a long and painful exploration of genetic testing options, I have ruled out the possibility of adoption. Somehow, despite my rich history of whiskers, I am unable to produce decent facial growth. They call this “The Archipelago”.

Oh, I have tried, I have shaved every day for months then abruptly stopped. Nothing. I stopped shaving for a month just to see what I would get. Nothing. I have tried encouraging my cheeks with group sing-along sessions, hoping it would sprout of forest of whiskers. Nothing. Every time it’s the same deal. My facial hair looks like the singed remains of a woodland recently wrecked by wild fires.

But last Friday, while talking with Peter (who could easily grow an impressive beard but chooses not too), I began to sketch some beards. This gave way to some shapes, and now I am happy to announce that I can now mask my deficiencies with the Power of Picnik. You can too! Make sure you check out our collection of beard shapes. Free for the taking.

Together we can make a difference.

As some of you already know, today we’ve integrated all of Picnik’s photo-editing capabilities with SmugMug’s 400-million-photos-strong photo sharing site! So SmugMug users, edit your photos by clicking the “edit” button on your Upload page, Edit Gallery page or Tools menu!

We’ve launched a wildly popular Eye Color Tool in Touch Ups, making it easier than ever before to get the eye color you’ve always deserved, and a color picker to go where nature never intended!

Also, now in Shapes: Have you noticed the increasing crispness to the air? Southern Hemispherers, has playing Beach Rugby given you a taste for tinsel? Christmas Shapes are back! Which means Santa Hats are again available for dogs, ducks, and Flickr avatars! Plus stickers, wreathes, stockings and snowflakes, with more on the way!

Finally, there’s a new Frame: Postage Stamp! Just in time for those holiday e-cards, turn your photo into a stamp and save the 42¢.

Tuesday is Veterans Day here in the States. Because the Civil War gave us a Memorial Day which predated World War I, we use November 11 slightly differently than the rest of the world. We honor our veterans, while elsewhere in Europe and the Commonwealth, it is Armistice or Remembrance Day, commemorating the end of that war and remembering the fallen.

To help mark the day and the period leading up to it, we’ve added some new Poppies to our Shapes collection.

And don’t forget to visit the sites of the Royal British and Royal Canadian Legions.

Picnik has won the Third Annual Pixel Awards in the Geek Category! Out of thousands of submissions from industry leaders, and five semi-finalists chosen by judges, we won this award because you voted for us! Thank you!

Thrillingly, this award represents our introduction to the wonderful world of swag, because we’re getting presents with our prize! We are so Hollywood.

We’d also like to congratulate Featured Picniker #2 Vinci Galang, whose picture “non colpevole” the Pixel awards folks decided to feature as a sample of Picniked awesomeness.