All across the Northern hemisphere people are celebrating the return of summer and here at Picnik we’re digging out the wicker basket and unrolling the checkered blanket by putting forth a challenge for Picnikers to show us how they’re kicking off the season by posting their best summer pictures with their favorite Picnik effects to Twitter, with a prize to the winners! Check out all 200+ images by clicking here or searching for the contest hashtag #SummerPicnik.

A big congratulations to our three winners @smith521, @wildcat24, and @bellavaz. All three winners received a one year subscription for Picnik Premium!

We also had two more favorites: @welstechtrainer received three months of Premium for posting an amazing collage that won her the award for the most amazing time capsule image, and @sandra6dee won three months of Picnik Premium for the most joyful jumping picture.

Want to share you favorite pictures on Twitter? We’ve made it really easy! When you get to the Save & Share tab select Twitter and connect to your account. Congrats to all the winners and have a great summer to all!

Eating. Let’s be honest, it’s something we Americans are experts at! And here in Seattle, the home of Pike Place Market, world famous coffees, geoducks, Salumi salami, and the only certified fair trade and organic chocolate factory in the US, we really know how to eat right. We even managed to turn the Space Needle into a restaurant, for goodness sake! So, it was an ideal location for the first ever International Food Blogger Conference presented by Foodista.

Tickets to the three-day event sold out immediately, proving that not only do we enjoy consuming food, we also love talking about food, sharing our experiences with food, and pouring over the digital concoctions of fellow food bloggers. Sarah and I joined a panel called “Food Porn: Food Photography & Styling” alongside chef and author Kathy Casey and food stylist Patty Wittmann. We walked through a quick and dirty Picnik demo, showing the attendant foodies how easy it is to make your food look as delicious as it tastes. We demonstrated how to adjust for poor lighting with a quick auto-fix, resize the image so it fits perfectly on your blog, or flip your pineapple upside down cake upside down! We also showed how to make your alfredo absolutely dreamy with the Orton-ish effect, recreate Mom’s famous apple pie with the 1960’s effect, or sweep away those pesky crumbs with the Clone tool.

What a perfect fit for bloggers who need a little help making their pictures as mouth watering as the masterpieces they whip up! Thanks to all the attendees who asked great questions and offered their testimonials on how Picnik is already as essential as their recipes. Picnik and delicious dishes make a steamy couple and now the word is out.

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Those of you who use the microblogging sensation Twitter are probably already aware of twitter.com/picnik. From that chirpy perch, first Steve and now a whole flock of us watch every Twitter mentioning “Picnik” go by, and have built up a whole colony of happy Picnik users to follow. Those of you reading this blog post on the blog can see to your right the handy Twitter widget that keeps blog readers abreast of our past 5 tweets. And those of you who are looking at our Twitter page will notice that the most recent Tweet was posted from (be still your beating wings) Picnik!

That’s because the most recent addition to our covey of connections is Twitter! Now when you’ve completed Picniking, say, your photo of finches, you can Save & Share directly to your Twitter feed, while tweeting about it, all inside of Picnik! All this is possible thanks to our new partnership with Twitgoo, a media-sharing service created by Photobucket for posting pictures on Twitter.

But twittering isn’t all that you can do from inside of Picnik! You can also post your perfectly Picniked Profile Picture, or set it as your Twitter background! Happy Twittering!

Picnik’s gift generator has gotten a massage to make it even easier to give your favorite someone the gift of Premium awesomeness for a whole year! Perfect for everyone on your list, click here and you’re guaranteed to have your gift code before Christmas! In fact, you’re guaranteed to have your gift code before you can say “Well that was easy!” Either email the happy news to your happy recipient, or print out a custom card for a little extra physicality.

For just $24.95, the gift of photo-editing awesomeness to your friends, family, teachers, in-laws, and secret crush gives them access to all of Picnik Premium’s features and content for a whole year. Not to mention, it’s light on packing materials!

Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, has handily put together a short video tutorial on Layering (now in Premium Preview):

As seen in the video, Layering is done through the Photo Basket which can be found at the bottom of your Picnik window while in the Edit or Create tabs.

We got a great email today from the creators of EquiPortal (”Your Window On The Equine World“).  They were looking for a way to make it easier for their members to upload their photos, and found Picnik to be the perfect solution:

I have recently taken my first Picnik / Amazon S3 project live and just wanted to provide some feedback. I run a small company with limited resources so finding a feature rich product that was easy to integrate was a great find. I have created a blog about my integration exercise if you are interested: http://blog.contrastwebsolutions.co.uk/2008/08/using-picnik-and-amazon-s3-for-photo.html

If you would like a testimonial from the perspective of a small company feel free to take any text from my blog such as: “Picnik is a cool product, but it’s the way that it can be easily integrated in to our own websites that makes it great.”

Thanks for the service.

To find out how to bring Picnik’s photo-editing superpowers to your website, visit http://www.picnik.com/info/api.

Picnik’s very own Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, Brenda, has knocked up an excellent video tutorial of Effect Painting for the Picnikers group on Flickr. For those of you not regular contributors to the Picnikers Flickr Group (and if not, why not? There’s prizes to be had!), Brenda’s an American-in-New Zealand photography enthusiast with three kids, a gazillion photo sets, and an uncanny knack for harnessing the power of Flickr’s new video tool thingie. In fact she’s so good at this newfangled technology, we just had to post this here, too:

And of course this technique can be used on any of Picnik’s effects with the little icon!

Picnik is all about giving photo editing superpowers to regular people. Now, with the official release of the Picnik-in-a-Box API, we’re giving software superpowers to regular websites. In just a few hours, any website can integrate the Picnik experience right into its pages. Check out the demos, flip through the tutorials, and then join the hundreds of developers who are taking their sites to new heights with Picnik!

We call it Release 15 and in addition to all the great under-the-covers stuff that Mike has been talking about we’ve included some fun and useful features.

Fullscreen button. We’ve had a fullscreen mode for awhile now but kept it cleverly concealed. We love using Picnik full screen and now that we’ve had time to apply the proper caveats (Flash disables the keyboard in fullscreen mode) we’re boosting its prominence.

UI refinements for when Picnik is sized small. We still have a little more work to do but our goal is for Picnik to be useable down to sizes ~640×480. There’s some amazing smarts behind this so Picnik takes advantage of as much or as little space as you give it.

Picnik Tools. You have to check these out. No matter what browser you use we’ve made it easy to import images from the web into Picnik. But if you’re using Firefox we have a special treat. The Firefox extension snapshots entire web pages and brings them into Picnik for editing! I’m snapshotting everything these days: cool sites to share with my friends, anything I want to blog about, even purchase receipts! Then they’re easy to mark up, crop down, gussy up with Picnik and save, email, print, whatever.

Tumblr, AOL, and ‘Other…’ added to Email to Web Site. If a site accepts emails, Picnik makes it easy to get your photos there.

Crop enhancements for creating avatars and wallpaper. Is your Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, Google Talk, Xanga, or Last.fm icon getting stale? No more excuses now that Picnik makes it easy to create a new one.

3 new Special Effects: Heat Map, Duo-Tone, and Lomo. Two parts fun, one part functional. You decide which is which.

Enjoy!

After a week and a half of jury duty (not guilty!) and a super busy week in the office last week (writing code, testing code, shopping for PR agency) things are getting back on track. We have a big release this week. In this post I’m going to talk about the big change that I hope you don’t notice. We’ll be rolling out our high availability/scalability solution over the next two weeks. (CDN sales guys: this is not an implied request to have you call me and try to sell me your solution. Again.) Call us optimists, but we think that in the next couple of months you’ll be hearing about some major partnership deals that will dramatically increase our traffic and it would be nice if we were ready for the traffic.

I’d like to thank Brad Fitzpatrick at Danga/Live Journal for sharing the tools and architecture that they use at Live Journal. It’s great to be able to take advantage of the expertise of others. We hope that we can contribute some software back to the cause with our Python MogileFS wrapper and some PerlBal plug-ins. Stay tuned, we will have a labs page up soon. We’re also big fans of Cal Henderson’s conference sessions and his book–go check it out.

Currently, Picnik is running on a single web server and two DB servers. Starting this week, we (primarily Justin and I) will be rolling out our solution that allows us to scale horizontally and take advantage of all of those other servers in our rack. The first piece of the puzzle is the PicnikFS wrapper that encapsulates MogileFS and is a first step to taking advantage of off-site storage like Amazon’s S3. Once we’re happy with the stability of PicnikFS we’ll turn on PerlBal and start load balancing across several Web servers. The last piece of the software puzzle falls into place when we separate our rendering code from the web server and get it running on our 4/8 core boxen.

For what it’s worth, our existing box has done a great job. No major hiccups even when we got crunch’d and photojojo‘d.

We’re also tweaking our upload code to elimiate some of the errors that a small percentage of you have been seeing. Please send email to feedback if you see any errors uploading your pictures.

Darrin, Peter and Brian also have lots of goodies ready for the next release, more on that in my next post.

Enjoy!