picnik comes with a free-to-use image editing API for your website

By | January 23
1 Comment

picnic.gif Ever heard from Picnik? It allows you editing your images direclty within your browser. Forget Adobe Photoshop :) Picnik has been around for a while now but recently it started to offer its service for the public. for free! I played around a bit and must say that it is amazing .. Use it within PHP, classic ASP, .net, Ruby on Rails or whatever… especially i like the idea of the whole service which works like this…

  1. Send your images to their service (existing image via URL or encoded as multi-part)
  2. Then the user modifies the picture (size, colors, rotation, special effects…)
  3. Picnik sends you the picture back to your server (either an URL where you can download it or directly as multi-part image)

Here comes an example I have built for demonstration…Click on the picture below to edit it.

Everything realized by using a link to this URL:

HTML4
< view plain text >
  2.   ?_apikey=178ef7667a0c301dd8eb89e76caba626
  3.   &_import=http%3A//www.webdevbros.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/googleapple.jpg
  4.  &_export=http%3A//www.webdevbros.net/2008/01/23/picnik-comes-with-a-free-to-use-image-editing-api-for-your-website
  5.  &_export_title=back%20to%20webdevbros

Pretty cool isn’t it? Thats the basic example but you can customize a lot more (see their API). Also I didn’t progress the picture back on my server.

If you want to get started i recommend to start with their tutorials. They are nicely written and done in 10 minutes.

One comment on “picnik comes with a free-to-use image editing API for your website”

  1. My girlfriend used to use this for editing the photographs she took, because she didn’t have access to Photoshop. I wouldn’t call her a computer whiz, but some of the stuff she came up with using Picnik was pretty good =)