It’s that time of year again… Picnik has gone spooky! Our favorite time of the year is Halloween, and we always get a little giddy when it’s time to braaaaaainstorm the holiday’s feature suite. Halloween was our first holiday after we launched three years ago, and we always have the most fun making the tools to turn your photos into a grisly ghoulish fright fest.
All of the past three years of freaky effects are back with loads of new gruesomeness.
Halloween Fonts! Write your name in ghosts, or skeletons, or lettering that any Transylvanian count would be proud of with our eight spooky fonts.
New Halloween Stickers! Added to our collection of spiders, bats, black cats and jack-o’-lanterns (to name but a few) we’ve added lots of photo-realistic shapes to use as Halloween props in your photos. Plus new candy stickers for the Trick-or-Treaters.
New Halloween Effects! Last year’s favorites are here, the Vampire Eyes, the Blood Stains, the Zombify 2.0. But this year we’ve added Blood Splatters, Funhouse Mirror, plus nine more single click effects for instant Scary Movie posters.
New Halloween Costumes! Face Paint is back, and so is OgreVision, and with them come new Masks, Eyeballs, and paint-on Fake Beard!
Plus:New Halloween Frames (Eyeballs, in a frame!), tons of custom new Fancy Collages, and a whole collection of Textures just for Halloween.
We hope you all have a hair-raising holiday and wish you Happy Halloweening from Team Picnik!
The days of pencil sharpening, hand raising, and homework are about to begin, so Picnik has put together a whole bunch of ways to help you teachers out there get to know and celebrate your new batch of students.
Snap your students’ photos on the first day of school and use the new set of Back to School Fancy Collages to create class photo frames, desk nametags, blog headers, and more.
Thanks to suggestions from teachers around the world, we’ve also put together a list of suggested Picnik activities to use with your students.
Have your own spin on using Picnik in your classroom? We’d love to hear about it! Share your ideas in the educator section of our Feedback Forum!
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.
Big news! After three years of bringing photo-editing awesomeness to Picnikers around the world, we have at last brought together all our help resources (and a few more besides) into one easy, accessible, searchable place!
First, let us introduce you to our brand new Picnik Help Center! Not only is there an answer to just about any question we’ve ever been asked but also a Getting Starting Guide, which cannily walks newcomers through finding their photos, saving them, and everything that can be done to them in between. Even more thrillingly, and this is something we’ve been wanting to do for ages, a whole section of Picnik Tips and Tricks, leading people in their Picnik Mastery from Seed stage to Big Shady Tree. That’s right folks, we have tutorials!
Second, we’ve completely remodeled our Forums. Ask a question, browse previous discussions, or pull up a seat at the Picnik Table to share your Picniked Masterpieces or find out what other Picnikers are up to.
Finally, we’ve added a quick way to look up your username or password if you’ve forgotten either, and for Premium Members, priority support from our Community Therapists who are happy to help you with anything else you need help with!
And a big congratulations to our crack team of Community Therapists who have been working so hard to get all this up and running!
When Picnik was acquired by Google a few months back, we were so excited by the possibilities. How many ways could we use this big worldwide platform to tell even more people about the awesomeness that is Picnik? One giant step we are taking today is the integration of Picnik into Picasa Web Albums. When you select “edit” inside of Picasa Web Albums, you now have the option of using Picnik to edit your photo. So from today, all Picasa Web Albums users have seamless access to the editing power of Picnik without ever leaving their account. When you save your edited photo back to your PWA album, you can either replace the old image or save a new copy. For our Picnik Premium members, you can access your premium account features from right inside of your Picasa Web Album account. And of course, you can always still pull your images into Picnik from your PWA account without ever leaving Picnik!
We’re thrilled to be able to announce this step in our integration with Google, and we hope you are too. Happy Picasaniking!
We’ve gone nuts for Old Glory this year with a whole new suite of Effects, Stickers and Fancy Collages for the 4th of July! Cover your photo with twinkling Bokeh Stars, turn it Red, White and Blue, cover it with flags, bunting, and patriotic hats, explode Fireworks all over it, then place your patriotic pièce de résistance, in one of our new collections of Party Mailers and scrapbook-style Fancy Collages!
Speaking of Stickers, today is Canada Day! O Canada, our friendly northern neighbor, we have all the Red and White and Maple Leaf-festooned stickers you could ever want in our seasonal Stickers section. And of course our Text tool is as bilingual as the National Parks! And speaking of French (and speaking French), don’t forget Bastille Day is fast approaching too! Picnik has a fine set of French flags, berets, baguettes and more for you patriotes et patissiers.
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.
We here at Picnik think that fatherhood goes beyond the recliner and lawn mower jokes. We think that raising kids is an adventure, and dads love documenting the escapade with photos: School portraits, family snaps from summer hikes, baby pictures, dads love these things!
So this Father’s Day, give your dad something to really make his cubicle glow with pride: An action-packed tale of paterfamilial derring-do and barbecues with our new Father’s Day Effects and Stickers.
Whether you play soccer or football, whether you support Australia or South Africa or Italy or Brazil or any of the qualified teams, Picnik has everything you need to drape your allegiance around your neck, paint your face with pride, and surround yourself with the colors of your national squad.
The most popular game in the world, fuessball has long been called “the beautiful game.” It’s gone from its origins as the game of a few English university students to an international organization with 208 national fútbol teams playing for its championship title played every four years. That’s 16 more countries playing calcio than are represented in the United Nations! Of those, just 32 knattspyrna teams will advance to the finals in South Africa this week.
So when the サッカー starts up this week, come to Picnik for everything 축구: scarves, face paint, flags and anything you need for soccer in whatever language.
Happy Picniking from Team Picnik!
Update June 17th
Team Picnik’s own Annie Laurie made this easy tutorial explaining all the new footie features:
It’s the Memorial Day Long Weekend: The ads are all for barbecues, the malls are all having sales and here in Seattle, it’s pouring rain.
As the official opening of summer with the end of school on the horizon, everyone gathers around in the late spring sunshine (or huddles out of the rain, as the case may be) in a relaxed, carefree spirit with friends and family. These days there are many ways to celebrate Memorial Day, and we here at Picnik want to help you celebrate it with memories. So whether you have a photo from your family barbecue, your day at the beach or a loved one serving overseas, we have a whole new section of Memorial Day Stickers including the barbecue, but also the parade, the poppies, and the yellow ribbons. We also have new military-themed Camouflage Frames, in both traditional and digital camo, representing as many kinds of terrain (including pink!) that you might find yourself in.
Have a safe and happy Memorial Day, and Happy Picniking!
