Picnik Firefox Extension
I covered Picnik, the web-based image processor back in April. But the photos still originated on your drives, either uploaded directly to Picnik or through a photo-sharing shite, making it a little less than a true “web-app”. Well, now thanks to the Picnik Firefox Extension, you can take a screen shot or find a web-mounted picture and import it directly to Picnik (assuming you use Firefox, of course.)
I can definitely see this being used to add images, possibly cropped, “doodled”, or with text or block shapes, into a paper or presentation (suitably acknowledged to avoid plagiarism, and under proper fair use or copyright permission, of course). If you didn’t want to download the new photo before adding it to your project, you could import into one of the photo-sharing sites available.
Picnik works directly with Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, and Webshots. You log into your photo-storage/sharing site via the links within Picnik and “activate” Picnik. (Activation is essentially giving Picnik your passwords. Use at your own risk.) Then you can choose your photos, edit, and save the newly edited photo into the site. Or email it, print it, download it, or save it to a different site.
This is the original image from NASA’s JPL PhotoJournal.
This is the image I produced in Picnik.
I imported the image directly from the NASA site. (US Government materials are in the public domain by law.) I cropped, heightened the contrast to show the smoke a little more, and added the text in Picnik. Then I exported the image to Flickr, which is the source for the image above. No downloading at all, so no worrying about virus checkers, disk size, or plugging my USB drive into a public computer.
Update (12/6/07): You can now edit Flickr pictures from within Flickr. Just click on the Edit button on your photo’s page (you can only edit your own photos.)
