Our 18th Featured Picniker is Nagehan Berre Erkılıç, a university student in İstanbul, Turkiye. Nagehan had a difficult childhood and from the age of 7, she and her brother lived with her grandparents. Growing up in a rural area of Turkiye, she focused on her painting, viewing the white pages as a space onto which she could paint the things she had lost. Later, when she passed her university entrance exams, she moved to İstanbul, the cultural center of the country, rich in art and history. She worked as a stand hostess, saleswoman, and private English tutor, and living away from her family for the first time, began to find herself. This let her rekindle her relationship with painting, which then led to her interest in photography. She spent some time doing amateur modeling, which meant she needed a tool to edit her photos. Searching for a good program that’s easy to use and rich in effects, she found Picnik!

A prolific photographer and editor, she has a Facebook fan site devoted to her photography, called Berre’s Creation. Her number one rule in life is to choose a job which really makes you happy, so it won’t feel like a job anymore. Through photography, she found a job she loved, and Picnik made her photography happen. Therefore, she adds, history starts at zero, if the zero is in the right place. And her history started with Picnik.

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Nagehan: Tuesday, 2 November, 2010, at 7:58 am. It all seems like yesterday! I was surfing the net to find a program to make me feel relaxed and busy with my photos when I saw Picnik’s link. When I first entered [the app], I’ll never forgot that I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Because some of sides of my moods can be bloody, the original reason to stick with Picnik was the Halloween effects. I have never seen such original effects before. So, I spent all my time making scary photos. Then, of course, day by day, I met all the colors and smells of Picnik’s wonderful world. I laid a blanket and started Picniking.
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October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and we’ve brought back some great Effects and Stickers to help you take part and support the cause.

Add the Go Pink! and Frame it Pink Effects or add a pink ribbon Sticker to the photos you share.  Make your voice heard by tweeting your Pink-ified photos, showing them off on Facebook, emailing them out to friends, or adding them to the Picnikers group on Flickr.

Join us in spreading the word about early detection, prevention, and a cure.

Team Picnik would like to introduce all Picnikers to the lovely ladies of Hants East Rural High School in Milford Station, Nova Scotia, who have started the PICNIK EDITING CONTEST group on Facebook!

Since her ascendency to the administrative chair in April, Trish Isenor, the group admin, has managed a 459% increase in membership and 19 contest topics ranging from subjects as varied as “Best Party Pictures,” “Best Shopping Pictures,” “In Memory Of…” and “Camping”. Ahh, the joys of youth.

So attention all Facebooking Picnikers! Join this group! But as of this week’s theme “Sunsets and Nice Scenery Summer Photos”, all the first prize winners get free three-month Picnik Premium subscriptions!

Small print: it’s just for fun (and prizes!) and Trish and her friends are doing this on their own so any technical questions should be directed towards Team Picnik Members via the Feedback Button inside Picnik.

Our first Featured Picniker is a nineteen-year-old Canadian student. Katie McDonough came to the attention of Team Picnik late last summer, after we launched on Facebook. The fact that she’s a perfect representation of a Facebook Picniker hadn’t nearly as much to do with it as did the fact that she’s amazingly talented, and was instantly taking the sorts of pictures any other university student has in spades, and using Picnik to create beautiful, lyrical, poetic creations with them.

Because of her talent and because she was using Picnik exactly how some of us dreamed our users would, and because she’s been with us since the beginning of our relationship with Facebook, Katie soon became a sort of icon for us, an archetype for everything a Facebooking Picniker can be, and everything our users can be capable of. So, of course, we had to feature her for our inaugural Featured Picniker post.

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All of us are very heads-down this week on a wide variety of new things for Picnik.  For example (and in no particular order) Steve’s working on a couple very cool new effects that he demo’d for us the other day.  Plus he continues to improve and streamline the experience of editing photos from one of our many cool partners like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Photoworks.  Some new partners coming soon!

Mike is deep in the banking part of the e-commerce industry this week.  He is building the back end support for the subscription system… making it a solid experience so our Premium users can continue Picniking without a hitch.

Brian is working on very related stuff building and integrating the front-end aspects of the subscription system.  But also (spoiler alerts!) he is adding new fonts and shapes!  What I’ve seen over his shoulder is WAY cool… carrying some momentum from early design work Peter had laid out.

Jonathan and Monica have been connecting us with tons of reviews and write-ups… even a little TV action!  I’ll get a list together in the next few days for you to check out.

I won’t run down everyone today, you can see what I’m up to… especially if you’ve sent feedback lately. :)

BTW – did you know you can add Picnik as a Facebook application?  Do a search for “Picnik” on facebook, or just click this link.

Shouts to our Flickr and Facebook user groups!

- Picnik de Fotos… Hola!
- *picnik addicts * BFF!

Good afternoon! Let me introduce myself: I’m Steve Leroux, and I’m Picnik’s newest employee. I’m very excited to join the Picnik team (title: Software Engineer & Importer of Fine Teas), and frankly I’m also a little awestruck at how incredibly talented everyone here at Picnik is. But then again, given how awesome Picnik’s software is, the talent level should come as no surprise.

For the past month or so I’ve been immersing myself in all things Facebook, and you’ve already been enjoying some of the fruits of my labor (such as attaching photos to wall posts and browsing your Facebook friends’ photos). Well, today we released an update that will make our integration with Facebook even more seamless: you can now skip the approval step when saving your photos to a Facebook album. And even better, you can also edit photos you’ve already uploaded and then save them right back to Facebook.

We’ve got plenty of other exciting things coming down the pipeline, but I’ll leave that news for another time. Enjoy the new Facebook features, and have a great weekend!

Summer may be waning, but we’re churning out the new releases like a steam-powered printing press. Here’s what’s new:

Type has landed! By far the feature you’ve requested the most, Type has at last been added to our Create tools. You can find it next to Special Effects, and LOL to your heart’s content. Or you can say serious, meaningful things too. Check back for an ever-evolving type tool as we tirelessly strive for typographic perfection.

Facebook Friends Photo browsing. Now you can browse not only your own photos but all your friends’ as well, including photos other people have taken, tagged with your friends’ names. In the Photos tab, under Facebook, click the Facebooker dropdown menu. Your friends’ worlds are at your fingertips!

Facebook Post to My Newsfeed. Quick shortcut to push any photo (yours or your friends’) right to your Newsfeed. In Picnik, either click the new checkbox while saving a photo, or click the little gear menu beneath the thumbnail while browsing under the Photos tab. Your world is at your friends’ fingertips!

Facebook one-click photo editing. If you have Picnik installed in your Facebook account (click here if you don’t!), you’ll now be able to edit your own and your friends’ profile pics in just one click! You’ll also notice new edit links inside your Picnik Profile box that will let you pull those pics straight into Picnik.

The wheels are turning fast here at Picnik World Headquarters, so keep checking back for more thrilling updates!

It looks like Facebook updated some code last night and broke us (and most other Flash applications). We’re working on getting this fixed ASAP…

 Update: Facebook is back!

While summer in Seattle officially starts the day after the 4^th of July holiday, summer for the Picnik team started early. The blog has been a little slow because some of us have been traveling, on jury duty and/or attending family reunions. Now that some of us have gotten that out of our systems (more or less) we’re back on and working on getting rid of that pesky “beta” tag. We’re a little old skool here, we think “beta” is a temporary state of being, not a postfix to a product name. Stay tuned; it’ll be an interesting summer. I promise.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we have over 200k users on Facebook, and we’d love to see more. When we were not attending to family and civic duties, we were quietly polishing our Facebook experience. We really like how it has turned out. If you haven’t tried Facebook yet, go sign up! Facebook is open to all users now, not just the elitist college folk. And if you’re already a Facebook user, be sure to check out the Facebook-enabled version of Picnik. Facebook users can try it out here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2258014869&b.

And last, but most certainty not least, I’d like to welcome the newest member of the Picnik team, Monica Harrington, marketing guru. The attentive readers of our blog probably noticed that Monica and I share a last name and quickly jumped to some kind of relationship conclusion.  You are probably right, but it’s only through a quirk of fate. Monica and I are married, but Harrington is her maiden name. Mine too.  It was a nice convenience when we got married, but family reunions can be a little confusing. It’s great to be working with Monica again. We haven’t worked together since the Valve days. As much as I’m looking forward to working with Monica, I’m especially happy to be working with her assistants, Frank and Emma.

Monica and her assistants. 

Rumor of the day: Text. Stay tuned.

Last night, Picnik passed the 100,000 user mark on Facebook! Proof!

Thanks to everyone for adding us and for all the great feedback! We’re stunned, thrilled, and downright giddy. Stay tuned as we work out kinks and come up with some great new Facebook features.