Travel season is nearly here! And in honor of National Travel & Tourism Week, we here at Picnik would like to extend a gentle reminder not to forget to pack your camera! Think of all those great vistas, silly signs and amazing people you see on your travels. You wouldn’t want to lose any of those moments, so leave the extra pair of shoes behind if you must but make room for that camera.

To help celebrate, and because sharing photos we’ve taken is one of our favorite things to do, too, we thought we’d show off some favorite travel photos from the Picnik team:

We hope that whether your coming adventures take you across oceans or close to home, you capture those memories you’ve created, and use Picnik to share them at their best with friends, family, and the world.

Happy Picniking and happy travels!

Our friends at Picasa Web Albums have devised an ingenious way to add new levels of awesomeness to your photos by collaboratively editing with your friends using Picnik. Invite others to contribute to an album by uploading photos of their own and by editing the photos that are already there.

The original photo stays safe as your collaborators, even the evil ones, make their edits. When they’re done in Picnik, they save the photo back to your Picasa Web Album as a new image, and their names will be shown to give them credit for all their stellar work. So let everyone give you pointers on editing techniques, help out editing your hundreds of vacation photos, or have fun with speech bubbles: fire up a caption contest to explain that funny expression on your face!

To get started, simply share a Picasa Web Album with your friends, and be sure to click the checkbox to let the people you share with contribute to your album. Happy Picniking!

Are there wedding bells in your future? Picnik has teamed up with several Google products to launch www.google.com/weddings where you will find a range of tools to make your wedding stylish and a cinch to plan.

Look picture perfect: Use Picnik’s range of photo-editing tools and quick fixes to look your best. Engagement photos for the local paper, portraits for the invitations, and all the pictures for your website can look as beautiful as the event.

Collage templates for every wedding: There are custom designed Fancy Collage templates for save the date cards, wedding invitations, and even table numbers, and perfect for your photos.

Share your joy: Make sure all your family and friends know your good news with a wedding website. With Google Sites, it’s simple. There’s an easily customizable template to match all the invitation styles on Picnik.

Stay organized: Keep your expenses straight, your vendors in line, and your warring aunts on opposite ends of the ballroom with Google Docs. There’s a template for organizing every aspect of your wedding.

Keep hold of your memories: Use Picasa Web Albums before your wedding to organize inspirational photos of cakes, dresses, or venues. Since they’ll always be online, they can be viewed by anyone, anywhere. And after the wedding, Picasa Web Albums can keep those photos safe from floods, fires, or stray moving boxes, while keeping them on hand for instant bragging.

And the best part is, all of this lives online. So whether you’re at home, at the office, or on the go at the tuxedo rental, you’ll have all your wedding plans at your fingertips. So you can get down the aisle with a picture perfect smile on your face.

And to make your smile even broader, we’re hosting a wedding sweepstakes to celebrate the launch of www.google.com/weddings! Couples can enter for a chance to win $25,000 towards your dream wedding (see Official Rules). Plus, renowned wedding planner Michelle Rago and her team will advise the winning couple on location, flowers, food and other design elements to create a day that is uniquely their own.

To get started, go to www.google.com/Weddings. For more ideas and help, try our Getting Started guide. Congratulations and happy planning!

Picnik is great for educators. Student profile cards, class photos, bulletin board announcements, lesson plans, and book reports all sparkle with Picnik’s photo-editing superpowers, Fancy Collages, Stickers and Text tools.

The Picnik Help Center has lots of ideas to get your classroom more creative, and the Picnik Forums have a place for educators like you to share their tips, tricks and questions. Do you have any favorite teachers in your life? Let them know!

Picnik is excited to announce that now one of the world’s largest social networks can edit their photos with Picnik!

Orkut’s multi-millions of users now will have unfettered access to photo-editing awesomeness without ever having to leave the popular social network. On the photo page of any photo in any orkut album there will be an edit with Picnik (or editar com o Picnik, as the case may be) button which will instantly launch Picnik inside the orkut window!

Take a look at the orkut blog for more info on their newest feature (in English and Portuguese).

Orkut is huge in India and Brazil. So we think it’s great that this integration is happening not only in time for the Holidays but also during the southern hemisphere’s summer vacation! Hopefully there will be lots of pictures and memories to share during the season.

Happy Picniking!

Vicki Dvorak, blogger, children’s art instructor, mother, and photographer is our 18th Featured Picniker. Vicki grew up with a father working in Forestry and Agriculture, which meant she spent her childhood moving around the Western States (California, Colorado, and Washington), and using her own creativity to entertain herself: making her own doll houses, doll clothes, collages, sketching and painting and never being bored because, with her creative mind, she always had something to do.

Vicki took this creative streak (and inability to sit quietly behind a desk) and put it to work studying Recreation Leadership after high school and working as a children’s recreation leader, camp director and preschool art instructor. Since then, she’s gotten married, had three children, and as her kids have gotten older has been so excited to discover a new creative outlet: photography!

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The daily routine of those of us on Team Picnik is fairly straightforward. It varies depending on whether it’s a photos meeting day (Wednesdays), afternoon flapjacks day (Tuesday), or the Monday status meeting day (Mondays), but generally we spend all day according to the ebb and flow of email, meetings, and the adorable march of the ZooBorns blog’s baby lemurs, bats, belugas or pygmy hippopotamuses across our Google Readers. So imagine the surprise, delight and excessive use of ALL-CAPS emails to the team when Andrew Bleiman, Co-Founder of ZooBorns, left a comment on the blog a couple of weeks ago to congratulate us and call us (us!) invaluable.

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Late June. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the vuvuzelas can be heard around the globe.

All you soccer fans whose teams have made it through to the second stage: Redouble your efforts to cheer your country further and further into the tournament! Make sure the world sees your support by tagging your fan photos with picnikfanphoto to get them onto the Picasa Web Album fan gallery below! Flickr Picnikers can use the same tag to show off their team spirit in this Flickr slideshow.

Have fun, good luck, and happy Picniking!

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 on Facebook, join the rest of our 173,000-plus fans for all those updates and the fun pictures that we make for just all you Facebookers too!

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 ever-so-proud of our very own Darrin Massena for winning the Technology Innovator of the Year award at Wednesday night’s WTIA Awards. He’s got a fancy vase on his desk now, and the rest of us have sparkly “Washington Technology Industry Association” swag bags full of tchotchkes. The award has set off a flurry of press coverage, including some thoughtful photographs of the cupcake tree those of us who couldn’t attend missed. And we’d like to thank John Cook (of the Puget Sound Business Journal’s Tech Flash blog) for sprinkling his Good Luck Curse-Breaking Fairy Dust for calling it too. It was very serendipitous of him!