Barry Dahl dot com

Many faithful Picnik users were sad to learn that Google will be shutting down the photo editing site in April, 2012. I use Picnik all the time and it was one of the few Web 2.0 sites that I was willing to pay for over the past few years. I gladly paid the $25 annual fee for a Premium membership so that I could access all the tools and also do my part to help them be sustainable. Then it was purchased by Google, and things to started to change. My Picnik account was created five years ago, on March 10, 2007. This screenshot below of the Picnik website was edited using Picnik to add the mirror frame, the text on top of two geometric shapes, and the highlighting of their closure date.

New post 5/2/712: Collage feature added by Picmonkey

Google keeps saying that the Picnik tools will be rolled into Google Plus and that we shouldn’t be worried about the future of our photo editing. Maybe they’ll end up with something really great, but so far it is extremely disappointing. Some (not many) of the Picnik editing features have been rolled out in the G+ Creative Kit. This is a seriously crippled version of Picnik, and not even close to what Picnik users are used to having at their disposal. Maybe they’re not done with the Creative Kit, but they don’t seem to be offering much information about what the future of Creative Kit will look like.

Additionally – I really don’t want all my photos accessible from G+, which I assume would mean they’ll be viewable by people in my circles – unless I tightly lock them down – or whatever my privacy options (that’s not intended to be funny) might be for photos on G+.

On Friday, March 9, I received an email from a photo service that I had previously signed up for. Their email said that they were ready for us to start using PicMonkey. It turns out that PicMonkey was developed by some former Picnik employees and they claim it to be “faster, more powerful, and easier to use” (plus “78% more monkey” which I assume is sort of like more cowbell). I don’t think that I would agree with the “more powerful” statement just yet, because not all of the Picnik tools are available, but many of them are. Although the UI is different, many of the tools appear to be direct clones of the similar Picnik tools. Anyone can use PicMonkey and you don’t even need to create an account to get full access to the service. Just upload a photo, edit it, then save it back to your computer. The screenshot below was edited in Picmonkey by adding the matte frame and the text along the top of the frame.

Probably because it’s new, PicMonkey doesn’t yet have all the tools that were available at Picnik. These are some of the Picnik features that I liked and used, and that I’m hoping become available at PicMonkey:

• Integration with my Flickr account (edit Flickr photos then save them back to Flickr)
• The “History” allows you to open any photo you’ve previously used in Picnik
• The “Photo Basket” makes it simple to combine photos via drag-and-drop
• Build a collage of photos (PicMonkey says this is coming soon)
• “Make a Show” will help you create embeddable slide shows and widgets
• Getting a photo from a website. Just enter the site URL and choose the photo (keep it legal)
• Currently, you can’t make an account at all at PicMonkey, which would be necessary for many of the things to work such as integration with other sites, photo basket, and history.

Some of the areas where PicMonkey is a match for Picnik include:

• All the basic edits (crop, rotate/straighten, colors, resize, etc) are there.
• Many “Effects” are there: B&W, Sepia, Boost, Tint, Soft Focal, 25 in all (Picnik has 37).
• Almost all “Touch Up” effects (15 out of 17), including: teeth whiten, blemish fix, red-eye removal, eye tint, cloning.
• Text tools include 27 different fonts, compared to the Picnik array of 16 basic fonts and 15 premium ($) fonts, and dozens of mostly useless goofy fonts.
• Overlays include things that I use such as speech bubbles, geometric shapes, arrows, and symbols; but don’t include the multitude of seasonal stickers and other clip artsy sorts of stuff at Picnik (NBD).
• The selection of digital picture frames is not nearly as extensive at PicMonkey, but all the basic ones are there.

Overall, I’m impressed with the roll out of PicMonkey. I’m guessing that they’ll be busy working to add new features and to make it an even better replacement for Picnik. This is photo editing for the 99% (where the 1% are those Photoshop users who need it and actually know how to use all the powerful tools in it). Now, please give me more monkey.

Filed under: Web2.0 |