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!

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!

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!

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 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!

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Vicki: I first heard about Picnik.com through an announcement a top blogger made on Twitter.

How has Picnik changed your life?
I don’t know what I’d do without it! All of my photo editing takes place using this amazing program! I can whittle away hours trying out the various processes, adjusting colors, and playing with the many fun effects.

What did you like most about Picnik when you first started using it, and what do you like the most about it now?
From the beginning I’ve loved Cross Process and it continues to be my favorite effect. I’m also enjoying playing around with the advanced option, Polaroid Effect. It’s fun to watch my photos take on this retro mood in seconds!

The simple, every day objects in your photos are all so exquisitely photographed that its easy to see the beauty of things that you see through your camera. Have you always been inspired by these things or did you learn to love them?

Thanks so much! I’ve always had a sense of wonder and an adoration for beauty, nature, and anything vintage. When I first started taking photos I did it for my own pleasure. As a blogger I had seen so many beautiful photos online and thought I’d try it out myself. My first photo was a rustic old barn with wildflowers in the foreground. My next was a vintage pink bike leaning against our white gate.  I edited both of them in Picnik and was so surprised and happy when they received so many positive comments on Flickr!

What do you use to shoot with?
I’m a little embarrassed to tell you what I shoot with, but here goes. I take my photos with a point and shoot Samsung Digimax TL110. As often as possible I put it on manual mode and am saving up to get my dream camera in 2011!

You speak so warmly about your friends, and the photography community on blogs and in Flickr can be incredibly rich and rewarding. How do your friends influence your photography and art?

I’m overwhelmed with the support and encouragement I receive through my blog, Simply Hue, and on Flickr.com. I’ve made so many precious friends from all over the world and I can’t tell you how thankful I am. I have a chronic illness and often the comments of these dear friends pull me through a difficult day.

What inspires you to pull out your camera?
Almost anything! But mainly blue skies, vintage objects, and old barns.

What’s one new feature you wish Picnik could have?
I would love an effect that would give my photos a realistic film look with a silky appearance and faded color. You probably already offer that on Picnik and I just haven’t figured out how to use it yet!

Your blog is at matissecolor.blogspot.com. How do the works of Matisse inspire you?
When my children were small I taught a children’s art class where they learned about famous artists and created projects based on an artist’s style. Matisse was one of my favorite artists because of the vibrant color he used in his work. A few years ago I started a color consulting business and helped clients choose a color scheme/paint colors for their home and decided to call my business Matisse Color Consulting. I started a blog to promote my color consulting business and Henri Matisse was the perfect inspiration!

Originally from Fairfield, Connecticut, where he attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, Andrew turned his back on the accepted pastimes of his peers of yachting and ascot collecting to attend the University of Pennsylvania where he earned a degree in English literature with a concentration (or distraction) in Baby Animalogy. Over the past 9 years he has led marketing strategy for tech companies and now develops new media strategy for a consumer goods company in Chicago, where he serves on the Auxiliary Boards of the Lincoln Park Zoo and Shedd Aquarium. In 2005 he began a blog with his brother called Zooilogix, devoted to bizarre and humorous zoology news, which got him on the press release lists from the zoos. To give a home to the photos of all the baby zoo animals, he began ZooBorns with his childhood friend Chris Eastland, an artist and former photo editor for Quest Magazine.

Rather than the usual “cute kitten” blogs, ZooBorns wanted to highlight the efforts of zoo breeding, rescue, rehabilitation and conservation programs, educating the reader while entertaining and making their eyes water with the cuteness. And Andrew uses Picnik on every one of the photos he posts! So what better excuse to publish all these adorable baby animals than by making him our 17th Featured Picniker?!

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Andrew: To answer this, I had to reach deep into the time vault that is Gmail only to find, at some point in 2008, I started using it. There was no beginning, it merely “was”. I can only assume that someone awesome told me about it.

What did you like most about Picnik when you first started using it, and what do you like the most about it now?
As it was in the beginning, so it is today. Picnik is so easy. So very very easy. I take photos shot by professionals at zoos and aquariums and sharpen, increase the exposure, crop and resize them with just a few clicks.

Bambi or The Bear?
Milo and Otis and/or Robocop 2

You’re unique among Featured Picnikers in that your featured photos aren’t pictures you’ve taken yourself. Do you enjoy photography?
I enjoy animals, zoos and conservation and outstanding photographs allow me to share those passions with tens of thousands of people every day. The beauty of ZooBorns is that the sum of the parts (i.e. pictures from individual zoos and aquariums around the world) equals more together than they do separately because people know they can check in every day and see something new. I’m relieved that photography is not a passion for me because my time is better spent using Picnik to prep as many pictures as possible for ZooBorns versus hanging around the monkey exhibit waiting for a baby to do something cute.

What’s the best Picnik effect for an underwater ZooBorn?
Exposure. Shots taken at aquariums are almost always too dark and all sorts of detail is lost. By increasing the exposure a few points, a baby animal’s fins, coloring and even sometimes a smile (see any beluga calf shot) can be revealed.

What’s the best Picnik effect for a hot weather Zooborn?
Temperature. On a bright sunny day, a brown animal on a brown rock atop some brown dirt all blend together in one giant orangish fur-dirt ball. By cooling it down, the different materials (fur, rock, dirt, etc.) separate from one another. Since I’m not a photographer, I don’t know the technical term for this but if it was chemistry, I’d say that the objects “preciptate out of solution.”

If any feature of Picnik were to be named after you, which would it be?
Probably “Teeth Whiten” a personal challenge of mine. Alternatively it would be “Follow us on Twitter” – shameless plug :)

Your blog has featured every animal from aardvarks to zebras and the impossibly cute fennec fox in between. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned during all this?
We’ve learned that when it comes to photographing animals, patience pays off. We often get our best shots from amateurs who spend their whole day camped out in front of a single exhibit for a handful of outstanding pics. On the flip side, we’ve also learned that if the content of the photo is compelling enough, the public doesn’t care about the quality. Send me a camera phone pic of a baby manatee doing a cartwheel with the American flag in its mouth and I’ll show you 500 views a second.

What’s one new feature you wish Picnik could have?
When Picnik invents a feature that plucks a baby lemur or tiny tamarin monkey out from deep within mama’s fur for one quick picture, please give us a call (case in point).

If you had to design a Picnik effect for a baby kangaroo that had fallen out of his mother’s pouch and looked not unlike Falkor from The Never Ending Story, what would that effect do?
Immediately add fur, flying abilities, and the voice of Alan Oppenheimer, or maybe Morgan Freeman, so it’s a little more contemporary.

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!

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!