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!

By very popular request, we’re pleased to bring you the Picnik Bookmarklet. This is a fast and easy way to get images from any website into Picnik in just one click. Here’s how to install it on Firefox, Safari, and Explorer:

Firefox:
Drag and drop this button to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

Safari:
Drag and drop this slightly sexier looking button to your Bookmarks Bar.

Explorer:
Right-click on this button and choose “Add to Favorites…” (near the bottom of the menu). Hit Yes if a Security Alert dialog pops up (it’s safe, we promise), then Add the bookmarklet to your Links folder to have it appear in your Links bar.

Now, anytime you would like to edit an image from a website, just click the bookmarklet to launch Picnik and display that website’s images. Or, you can navigate directly to the image you would like to edit, then hit the bookmarklet. In this case, Picnik will automatically load the single image straight into Edit mode.

Enjoy!

I put together a Firefox extension to make it easier to pull pictures that you find on the web into Picnik. You can try it by clicking here. Check it out, and let us know what you think!