One of the most important aspects of having a website or a blog is having images or photos in pages or posts, and this is where some people start to stumble a bit. If you’ve never worked with image manipulation software, this task can seem a bit daunting. Friends, family and clients have all expressed to me their frustration in not having the right software to do exactly what they want with their images – from getting rid of red-eye, to cropping and resizing an image, even to adding text to an image.

Well, I have some good news! There is a tool out there that I’ve found recently that will help tremendously, not to mention how easy it is to use! Actually, my 15 year old stepdaughter introduced me to it originally, and I’ve since come to love this tool!

Picnik is a powerful online image manipulator/photo editor that allows you to edit images right in your browser! One of its key features is the very fact that you don’t have to install anything on your computer – you just need to go to the Picnik website, wait for it to load, and away you go!

Picnik not only allows you perform some of the more basic editing functions, such as cropping, resizing, rotating or fixing red-eye, but it also allows you to add effects, text and embellishments, as well as create collages – from simple collages, to fancy collages with different holiday or special occasion themes! It also makes it very easy to undo changes, so if you’re not completely happy with your editing, you can easily undo as well as redo.

For someone like me who works with images constantly, whether it’s family photos from my personal collection or images for clients’ websites and blogs, this tool is absolutely necessary and I can’t express just how thankful I am for its availability! I have other photo editing applications installed on my computer, such as Photoshop and ACDSee, and certainly there are some things you can do with Photoshop that you can’t in Picnik, such as working with transparent backgrounds, but there are other functions that are so much easier and faster on Picnik, such as adding a frame to your picture. I find myself using Picnik more and more as I discover new features, and the time that it saves me is just an added bonus!

Picnik‘s standard service is free to use, but the premium service is something else I love because of its affordability: it only costs $24.95 per year! Yes, you read correctly – not per week, not per month – per year! When I read this, I signed up immediately because I knew right away I’d be using this tool on a regular basis, and I was able to easily make the payment via PayPal. It was well worth it for me because, as predicted, I use Picnik almost daily.

Another interesting feature that Picnik offers is the integration with other sites, such as Google’s Picasa Web Albums,  My Space, Photobucket, Flickr, and Facebook. Through Picnik, you can basically log into your account with these respective websites and access photos you have stored online through these services and edit them, without having to open another browser window! This is especially useful if you’ve got large albums stored on any one of these sites.

There are also plug-ins available for the Firefox browser, as well as self-hosted WordPress sites, which makes it even easier to use! (I’ve always been a big fan of Firefox and it is my preferred browser. I find it more secure than Internet Explorer.) As soon as I discovered this, I downloaded and installed both of these plug-ins to make the photo editing aspect of my life easier, and I highly recommend using them.

So, what are you waiting for? Go check out Picnik now and you’ll see for yourself just how easy it is to use!

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