Picnik For Linux Users

Much of the blogosphere has been talking about Flickr finally adding more advanced some photo editing features through a partnership with Picnik. Advanced photo editing features have been on my Flickr wish list for a long time, so I was excited to take it for a test spin and see how well it works.

Having tried Picnik in the past, I was less than impressed as a Linux user. On my first attempt to upload an image I came across a Linux specific bug that prevented me from seeing any of my image files in their file picker. A month or so after reporting the bug I heard back from Picnik and the bug had been fixed (a bad regex was to blame). Great, now I can try Picnik again, or so I thought. Although I could select files, every attempt to upload failed (badly - taking Firefox down with it). So I reported the bug and promptly forgot about Picnik after being told it was due to a bug in Adobe's Linux Flash player and that I should take it up with Adobe.

Fast forward to today and Picnik is available through Flickr - and working much better on Linux (this is probably due to the fact that I don't have to use Picnik's file uploader since files are already on Flickr).

How is Picnik from a Linux users point of view? Awesome because it brings photo editing tools into the work flow of uploading and organizing photos in Flickr. Picnik also does a good job of making image editing tools more understandable than PhotoShop or the GIMP and increasing the chance that I will actually use them.

Picnik still leaves room for improvement however. The application (flash-based) took a long time to load (a full 60 seconds). For now, I'm attributing the slow load to poor Picnik server performance after the Flickr launch. This will be a show stopper if it doesn't improve though. Also, some of the image editing tools performed quite well while other tools made the application unresponsive and hard to work with. Perhaps these are rough edges in the Linux Flash Player or just problems with Picnik itself.

Overall, Picnik is a nice option to have integrated into Flickr. As I get more time to play with the tools, I'll post tips and tricks that might be useful.