Announcing Picnik for Drupal

Editing and enhancing the photos in your Drupal site just got as easy and laid-back as a summer picnic. To bring this about, we've just launched a new "Drupal module":http://drupal.org/project/picnik for Google’s newly-acquired online photo editing application, "Picnik":http://www.picnik.com. Remember when the height of image editing was MS Paint? A tool like Photoshop was only for serious professionals with serious cash, and open source options were just too complicated. But, thankfully, the advance of digital photography brought a wave of tools that made it much easier for amateurs to erase red eyes or rotate images. And now, since many of us keep our images online in Flickr or Picasa, the latest trend is offering image editing as an online application, which only makes sense. Picnik goes beyond the standard resize, crop and red-eye reduction features that limit other applications. It also can add effects, text and graphic overlays and many more features - allowing you to add a bit of pizazz to your photos without a two-year photography degree on your resume. While Picnik offers a wide variety of features, we wanted to start out by focusing on integrating it's basic capabilities right from within Drupal allowing users to quickly and easily edit images once they were uploaded. h3. How it works After installing and configuring the module (more details on the "Drupal project page":http://drupal.org/project/picnik ) you will see an “Edit” link appear once you hover over images with your mouse. Clicking on the link will redirect you to the Picnik interface and load the image. Now you can do all the fancy things you ever dreamed of, like adding a sepia effect and adding the line “Once upon a time …” in a western font. After saving the changes you will be back to your Drupal site where you will see the original image vs. the new one.
 Once you give it the thumbs up, the new image will override the old one: h3. User/administrator permissions There are options to allow users to edit images only in nodes where they have permission to edit. So you can offer this feature on your community site and let your users edit their own pictures. h3. Picnik account requirements Administrators will need to sign up for a free account in order to get an API key for their website. If you're planning to make money off it, you'll definitely want to contact Picnik regarding a paid license. h3. Module compatibility Picnik works with CCK, inline images and ImageCache. It's been setup up to decipher when you want to edit an image that is an ImageCache preset. It will send the original image to Picnik and, upon saving, clear all ImageCache versions of that picture. h3. Future development Here are some of the items we want to add in the coming releases: 1. Support for Thickbox/Lightbox editing of images 2. Inclusion of the library options of Picnik (depends on the media options in Drupal7) 3. Revision history for images Those are a few of our initial ideas but would be happy to entertain more. Feel free to *give your input in the comment thread below*. So there it is - easy, intuitive and a lotta fun. We hope you enjoy your ‘Picnik’, Drupal community. Here's a short screencast of the module. Drupal Project Page: http://drupal.org/project/picnik