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!

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!

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!

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Update:  Looks like it’s working again.  Enjoy!

Other than the hiccup with our DNS provider, things are really great. There was a nice write up of Picnik (and four other products) in Extreme Tech yesterday. Both Slashdot and Digg picked it up.

We also released a small update this week with the final piece of Picasa Web Albums authentication. We now use fully signed reqests when sending requests to Google. Frankly, you won’t noticed any difference at all, except that now the Google authentication page no longer has that nasty warning about not knowing who we are. Now they know that we’re one of the good guys and they even have our logo on the auth page. We also added a way to clear your Flickr and Picasa credentials from your account on the account settings page. This was a quick and dirty page, we’re working on a nicer account management system in the near future.

Keep that feedback coming. Enjoy!

We’re also working on an updated user settings page that will allow you to clear your Picasa and Flickr information from your Picnik account. That will allow people with more than one Flickr or Picasa Web Album account to change which account Picnik is using.

Please keep in mind that the paint is still fresh on both Google’s Picasa Web API and our use of it, so please let us know if you run into any problems.

Enjoy!