Flickr, In Partnership With Picnik, Launches Editor

Posted by Paul Glazowski on December 5th, 2007

Profy’s Michael Garrett wrote in late October of an expected update to Flickr in the way of an image editor. Yesterday, the company delivered on its promise.

As mentioned in the previous piece by Michael G. noting the impending release, Flickr teamed up with Picnik to provide its users a set of tools – ranging from Auto-Fix to Rotate to Red-Eye – streamlined into its hosting service, effectively cutting out any need for Flickr users to maintain a duo of site registrations. Furthermore, no annoying switchbacks to contend with.

Of course, as a result of any such “high-profile” partnership one might speculate as to whether hosting services other than Yahoo!’s own are being short-changed in some way. Until the agreement made public between Flickr and Picnik just a couple of months ago, the editor was quite independent in regard to digital image hosts it had established channels with - at least as far as its message relays to the public and the press were concerned, anyhow. All in all, it seems simply to have chosen to strengthen its bond with Flickr for the fact that the vast majority of user activity is likely to originate from the Yahoo!-owned website.

I won’t go much into the details of the addition to Flickr, as the new feature set is quite straightforward very simply to operate. I’ll only voice – or reiterate, rather - a slight annoyance, previously highlighted by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, that involves an odd discrepancy between the use of Picnik by Flickr’s standard set of members and Flickr’s Pro account holders. It seems that those who have purchased Flickr Pro accounts are allowed to replace original images with images edited within the Picnik utility, whereas basic Flickr users cannot. They must save edited images as new files, and only through use of Flickr’s options can they proceed to delete “duplicates”.

Now, this is for sure a nitpicky issue to raise. Free is free, right? Why complain? But the fact that the barrier has been raised in such a way is astonishingly inane. Laughable, really. Rather than restrict the use of more significant editing functions, Flickr and Picnik have opted to draw the line at “Save this photo.”

Ludicrous. Simply ludicrous.

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