Rating:
The Picnik application is an incredibly smart marketing accomplishment, and a useful application. Through using it, I learned that they had a site outside of Facebook, and are going to create a paid version with more features.

If you’re marketing to someone like me who would want to use and buy an application like this, that’s an intelligent move. Also, despite the fact that this app can live outside of Facebook it doesn’t force me to use it outside in the open Web. Very smart. They’ll end up with more paid clients this way.

I know - most people aren’t here to read about marketing brilliance, you want to know how it works and what it does. Okay, party pooper…

(Kidding!)
But What Does It DO??

Picnik makes it incredibly fast and easy to change the properties of a graphics file you’re already in possession of, and it has the ability to pull that graphic from:

• Your Computer
• Facebook
• Picasa
• Flickr or Flickr search
• Yahoo Search
• A Web Site, or,
• A Web Cam Photo

Once it grabs it for you, it will let you do many of the common things we do with images- rotate them, resize them, crop them, apply a filter, change the format or the quality for compression purposes. After you’ve edited you can save it to where you got it from (except for searches of course), or save it to any service you’re a member of, with a different name if you like.

Things that make this application great instead of just good

Auto-fix: Make any picture instantly look more true to life at the touch of a button.

Memory: The workspace shows up just as I left it.

Simplicity: The intuitive interface didn’t have me searching for how to do anything. I installed it and instantly knew what to do and where to do to do it. It doesn’t complication matter with doing okay screen capture, or add mediocre useless features I don’t want. It does one thing great, lets me edit and save images to the collections I most use.
Editing Capabilities: Jing users: This is a fast way to get from PNG format to JPG. Jing and Picnik should totally get married and give birth to a new super-app. Picnik also lets me adjust images in ways that make them look like new ones. I took a really great picture after losing 40 pounds last year, but in it, I’m facing left. With Picnik, I could crop that picture and make myself face right, and the picture still looked completely natural. A Facebook friend instantly complimented me on it as if it were a brand new pic.
The name: If I didn’t use it for a year (never happen) and come back to it later, I’d know exactly what it was. It Nicks my Pics. Easy enough.

Things they could do better, but won’t change my rating

1. Take out the three day trial, and make registration completely optional.From a marketing standpoint, this is smart IF you’re not marketing primarily to consumers, make me fall in love with it by trying it, then if I don’t like it, I uninstall it. What would be smarter: Very simple version showing what I could do if I was registered - registration is free.
2. Do as good a job remembering where I’m uploading from as you do pulling graphics from multiple sources, and what I was last working on.
3. It’s a bit slow loading when you first power it up, though they turned that into a feature with the loading comments. I refuse to spoil this for you - read what the screen says when Picnik is loading. Hint: It’s a bit different each time.
4. Okay, there is no number four. I *heart* Picnik and as a blogger and online publisher, I can’t live without it.

Share this on: