Editing photos can be a Picnik

Many of you have installed photo editing programs. Whether it's Photoshop, Elements, GIMP, or some other program, there's an installation process. You have to load something on your PC. And, except for GIMP, you have to buy it.

But what if you could make some simple photo changes without installing anything on your computer? Or, what if you want to resize, crop, or do a little retouching while you're at school, in a library, or someplace else where you're using someone else's PC?

Now, with a fun little Web site called Picnik, you can. Let's say you want to crop an image. Point your browser to http://www.picnik.com and upload the picture. Click the handy little crop button, and you'll get the screen shown in Figure A.

When you're done, click the Save & Share button in Picnik and you have the option of saving your image back to your computer, or to Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, or even email the photo to a friend.

We like this site a lot because (a) it's free, and (b) it's fast, smooth, and clean. However, the site self-describes itself as being in "beta", and explains that some functions, like the filters shown in Figure B, will only be available to premium (read: "pay money") accounts.

Even so, this is an excellent little site. If you've got family members (read: parents) who you want to let retouch digital camera images, but you really don't want them going and installing software on their computers (read: lookin' for trouble), then sending them to Picnik is a great idea.

I don't have space here to describe all the features, but it's very easy to just go to the Picnik site, pick one of their sample images, and play around to see what Picnik can do.

Even though we're very impressed with what we've seen, we have two minor gripes that keep Picnik out of five-star territory. First, there's no way to add text to an image (although we're sure that'll be something added soon). And, there's no indication of just what the pricing will be for the premium accounts.

In the meantime, while Picnik is still in beta, go ahead and use it to your heart's content. It meets that most special combination of evaluation criteria: it's fun, it's impressive, and it's useful, all at the same time.