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!

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 It encompasses all seasons, it’s never out of date, it runs on any computer, and even if your loved ones already have Picnik Premium, a gift of Picnik Premium can be tacked onto the end of the current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.

So light up your nose, sling on some antlers and wreathe yourself in holly (or nuts!) for the most festive faces in town. It’s perfect for your Facebook profile, Twitter avatar, LinkedIn headshot or Congressional portrait, so make yourself a Snow Queen, a Reindeer or downright unrecognizable behind all that beard because we here at Team Picnik have put out a whole new section of flattering effects, silly hats and a whole bunch of nuts for our best holiday collection ever.

And for you Americans, we’ve got just the thing for those of us who’ll be having friends and family over for the Thanksgiving holiday with fun projects like Recipe Cards, Place Cards, Holiday Cards and more in our new festive Fancy Collages. And for after Thanksgiving, get started early on your Christmas shopping (or Wish List writing) with Picnik Premium, of course!

But we didn’t stop there! In the Library tab we’ve got a whole other line of Halloween content for you: Halloween Fancy Collages!

Halloween is obviously a holiday we love here at Picnik World Headquarters. Maybe it’s because it was the first holiday after our launch two years ago and the first occasion for any seasonal content, or maybe it’s because we’ve all been transformed into werewolves, zombies, vampires and other manifestations of the undead. Whichever it is, we always have a lot of fun at this time of year and, with a little help from Picnik, we hope you do too!

Vampire yourself! We’ve got the tools to let your eyes reflect your thirst, put a blood-gorged bloom in your cheeks, get vampiric film star good looks and a bloody tinge to your shiny new canines.

Get re-animated! Detect the delectable dead with Ghoul Eye, Zombify 2.0 (now with added rotting!) and the most hideous wounds we could find.

Haunt your friends and family! Manifest yourself to the living with Ghostify, make your photos the future with Crystal Ball, add a shaft of lightning to your dark and stormy nights and add the ghosts that only you can commune with to your sinister shots.

Plus! Give yourself ogre good looks, stain yourself with blood, add some scary shapes and props and express the pain of the undead with our most fearful fonts. It’s all so easy.

All these Halloween effects – and more! – can be found in the special Halloween section under the Create tab!

We’ve grown a lot as a company since last October and I’m afraid our capacity for mischief has grown as well. For instance, for the past two years at this time, Mike suddenly looks a bit off and starts mumbling about “braaaaaains“, Darrin seems furrier than normal and Jonathan keeps staring at Darrin’s neck. This year, since moving into new, larger offices, it’s a bit harder keeping track of where everyone is, but we would swear that some people are missing.

It all started at the beginning of the month. Mike called all the engineers into the conference room for a meeting. They were in there for hours and when they came out all looked a bit… pale. At first we didn’t notice, since they tend to sit silently at their computers anyway, rhythmically typing, typing, typing. Then we noticed none of them had headphones on. And they weren’t looking at their monitors at all, but staring really quite strangely at the backs of the designers’ heads.

Then the designers. No one noticed anything wrong with them, either. Sure, they came to work wearing black, with dark circles under their eyes, staring moodily and prone to dark corners, but what designer isn’t? It’s the coffin we noticed under Michael’s desk that made us wonder. It seems to have begun with that week Jonathan took them out to lunch, one by one. He took Kelcey out first, so why did she come back with two pricks in her neck? And the next day Michael came back from his lunch with Jonathan with a strange, thick, red fluid in his travel mug.

That’s when people began to disappear.

All this mysteriousness seems to have affected our work, hence the size of this week’s Halloween release. You can’t miss it under the Create tab, with four new scary sections! We’re really excited about all the creepy new features, and hope you all enjoy – or fear – them too.

(And where is Darrin in all this? He’s been pacing the length of his office, all alone, howling at the full moon.)

Directions: Make a Twitter account, if you don’t have one! Announce yourself by following @picnik on Twitter! Take your picture, then upload it and edit it! Then find the Twitter page under the Save & Share tab to Tweet your summery masterpiece!

The contest runs from Monday at 12.01 am through Thursday at 2 pm PDT. So why are we telling you this early? Because it’s a beautiful weekend in June! So get outside and get those photos!

Note to our Southern Hemisphere Picnikers: You are entirely welcome to include your photos of the grumpy weather you’re having right now.

Update: The contest is now open! Feel free to start Tweeting your submissions!

Update #2: The contest is now closed! Thank you to everyone who participated! We will announce the winners tomorrow, June 19 at 2pm PDT. In the meantime, check out the submissions on Twitter by searching for “#SummerPicnik”.

Just about everything on Picnik can be used towards digital scrapbooking greatness. The internet is full of handy free patterns and textures to use as new papers to layer with, and why limit yourself to your box full of die-cut shapes when there’s our huge collection of Stickers? We’ve got tons of fonts to put your memories into words, and for an extra head start there are all our collections of Fancy Collages, organized by theme. There are oodles of things on Picnik that even we haven’t tried yet, and National Scrapbooking Day is a great time for trying something new! And with our easy integrations on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and all sorts of other photo sharing and social networking sites, it can be like attending a scrapbooking party on National Scrapbooking Day, as well!

For inspiration, our own Brenda Anderson, Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, in had a Scrapbooking contest on the Flickr Picnikers group for the month of March, and to help celebrate all the possibilities of this craftiest of holidays, our friends at Blisstree are having a National Scrapbooking Day Giveaway: two free year-long Picnik Premium subscriptions, just for suggesting to her (and us) some clever feature ideas.