Facebook and The Future of Online Photo Editing
I have never been a real fan of online photo editors, but recently I stumbled upon two cool web-applications that offer some basic functionality that got me thinking. The two apps were called Picnik and Pixenate, and both offer some basic photo cropping, resizing and filtering of photos. Now, I used to hate applications like these because people made a comparison to Photoshop and any idiot who ever used Photoshop knows that this is not Photoshop. The tools can be better described by being an online iPhoto or Picasa. Here is where the fun starts.
When I first talked about Pixenate, I talked about how tools like these could change the workflow of the average photography user from “transfer from camera to pc -> edit -> upload” to something more like “transfer from camera to web - edit - publish” . This workflow with maybe some new firmware for cameras would make the process so much easier for so many people who really don’t care that much about editing. The cool thing is that the Pixenate tool can be bought to be installed to be integrated with any server.
Keeping this in mind, I was amazed to see the new features offered by Facebook since today. One of them was integration with Picnik, a flash based photo editor, without really branding Picnik as their own tool. It is interesting to see how they integrated Picnik into Facebook, allowing people to just upload whatever they feel like, not having to care about editing until the photos are uploaded.
Is this the future of photo editing for the average Joe? Is there any limit to what tools like Picnik can do that a tool like iPhoto simply can’t do better? Keep in mind that iPhoto will never be a Photoshop killer.
