Last week Flickr announced a partnership with Picnik.com to offer Picnik’s basic photo online editing through the web front-end. This is another example of the web encroaching on traditional desktop software. A trend that Adobe believes is the future, according to recent statements by its CEO. Though it may be the future, it’s definitely not there yet. Though the ability to do some basic editing inside Flickr is a nice bonus, the application is slow, requires payment to unlock more advanced features and falls prey to the incompatibilities presented but developing for many different browsers that each have a different definition of “standards compliant.” Not to mention the inability to edit high-bit depth images, the arbitrary limitation of the editable image being a maximum of 2800 pixels on the long end and the lack of layers. To its credit, the interface does allow you to undo all your changes and go back to the original rather easily. Its tools do work well, only exhibiting limitations when fed really poor images or when pushed beyond their intended use. Overall, it’s a fun toy, but nothing groundbreaking, and definitely not a replacement for desktop software yet. I say yet because I have no doubt that the network will eventually become just as powerful in single-user applications as the desktop is today, and that’s not even counting the possibilities of multi-use collaborative and social aspects.
In the meantime, if you accidentally uploaded the unedited file, it might be easier to fix than it used to be.
Main view once the editor loads your image:
Exposure controls (advanced brings up levels, highlight and shadow recovery):
All I did was hit “Auto Fix.” Not bad:
whatever, i think, flickr is offering in collaboration with picnic. in my opinion, something is better than nothing. and this may be future also, but will take time to bring hard disl on line.