How do you do decide which photosharing site to go with? If free is your criteria, there are certainly many options to choose from. Most free photo sharing sites are ad supported and come with a certain GB capacity limit. If you upgrade to a pro account, which can run anywhere from $20-$25 per year, there are typically no limits and no advertisements.
We took a look at the most popular photosharing sites' features and did a comparison to help you decide which photo site is best suited for your needs. We compared Flickr, Photobucket and Zooomr and then test drove each of the sites to see how well they did. Check out our unscientific findings after the jump.
Online image editor Picnik has always offered two tiers of service. Free users could access most of the popular image editing tools, while paid subscribers got a few extra bells and whistles and access to early beta features. But up until this week, there were no ads on the site whether you paid for an annual subscription or not.
Yesterday, Picnik decided to take all of the editing tools that had been available only to Premium members and offer them for free. This makes Picnik one of the most advanced free photo editors around, and puts the company in a good position to compete with FotoFlexer and the upcoming Adobe Photoshop Express.
But Picnik isn't getting rid of paid memberships altogether. You an still shell out $25 per year to get early access to new features, the ability to edit in a full screen mode, and an ad-free interface.
Ever want to add a powerful image editing application to your web site, but didn't have the time or expertise to develop your own? No problem. Picnik, which recently announced a partnership with photo sharing powerhouse Flickr, has launched an API which should make it possible for pretty much anyone to integrate Picnik's online image editing application with their site.
Using the Picnik API, you can let visitors to your web page load, edit, and save images using the Picnik interface, all without leaving your site. You can also build web applications around Picnik. For example, Better or Worser is a site that challenges users to use Picnik tools to improve upon images uploaded by other users.
It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon, out here on the edge of the prairie. Oh, wait, that's Garrison Keillor, not us. Regardless, here's some stuff that happened this week on Download Squad.
Has Facebook's Beacon caused your blood pressure to rise as your level of web privacy has fallen to a new low? Fear not. Dolores Parker shows us how to block that pesky Beacon and take back your life.
We love Flickr but, until now it's been strictly info-in, info-out. Editing your photos was something you did before you uploaded to Flickr, not after. Flickr's new partnership with Picnik means now you can crop, resize, adjust exposure, contract, color saturation and other aspects of your images with just a few clicks. Sweet!
Sure, Flickr is a great place to find and share images. But wouldn't it be nice if you could also edit those images online? Now you can. OK, you've been able to for a long time, using online photo editing sites like Picnik and SnipShot. But now Flickr and Picnik have added an "edit photo" button to that makes the process pretty darn easy.
We first heard that Flickr was partnering with Picnik back in October. At the time, we half suspected that all you'd see is an "edit with Picnik" button on each photo that would let you load up an image on Picnik's site. But the service that launched today is far cooler than that. You can access Picnik's powerful photo imaging interface without leaving Flickr at all.
That means you can crop, resize, adjust exposure, contract, color saturation and other aspects of your images with just a few clicks. You can also apply effects like converting color images to black and white. if you have a Picnik Premium account, you can access some additional effects like Infrared, Night Vision, Tint, and Invert.
In order to edit a photo, you'll need to login to your account and select an image you've uploaded. You'll should see an "edit photo" button in the toolbar above your picture. For now it doesn't look like there's any way to edit images uploaded by other users.
While you're waiting for Adobe to release Photoshop Express, you might want to take a look at Splashup. This web-based image editor has all your usual features like resizing, cropping, and some basic effects like sharpening, blurring, and pixelizing. But there are also some pretty advanced color controls and you an even use layered effects.
Splashup runs in Flash, so you should be able to use it with any web browser on any operating system. Unfortunately we were unable to get it to load an image properly using our new Eee PC (pictured above). That's a shame, because when you've got a portable web-enabled Linux computer with only 4GB of flash memory, that last thing you want to do is bog it down by installing applications. For now we'll just have to keep using Picnik and Snipshot to do our image editing on the go.
A few months ago we got a chance to talk with Picnik co-founder Mike Harrington (with an H) about the online photo editing application. He mentioned that the company was working out deals to place an "edit this picture with Picnik" button to online image websites. Now Techcrunch's Mike Arrington (without an H) reports that Picnik has landed one heck of a deal: Flickr will be adding Picnik integration soon.
Picnik already lets users import pictures from Flickr. But Flickr currently has a much, much larger user base than Picnik. The deal will give Flickr users the ability to do some advanced photo editing, while it will give Picnik a huge publicity boost.
Picnik comes in two flavors. There's a free version with a limited feature set (although you can still do all the basics like cropping, resizing, and applying many digital effects), and a subscription version that will set you back $25 a year.
Paid subscribers get access to extra editing tools, effects, shapes, and fonts. The free service also got an update this week, with Photobucket support. Here's some of the new features available to paid users:
Photobucket support - edit photos from Photobucket and/or save your images to the site
Effect painting - choose certain effects and apply them with brush strokes
New effects including invert, pencil sketch, and pixelate
Add shapes, symbols, or speech bubbles
Touch up tool for whitening teeth or removing zits (from photos, not real life)
New image frames
$25 a year seems like a pretty decent price to pay when you consider how much professional editing software like Photoshop can set you back. And because Picnik is completely web-based, the company can continue to roll out new features for paid users without asking you to upgrade.
Eventually some of those new features will probably make their way to the free version as well. But you get what you pay for, and Picnik will most likely be using its free site to promote its paid services.
We caught up with Picnik Co-Founder Mike Harrington at last night's Digital Life press preview and asked him a few questions about the online photo editor.
In a nutshell, Picnik is an online image editing program. It won't do everything that Photoshop does, but it has many features that are missing from other online applications. Because it's flash based, image editing takes place in real time. You don't have to send a message to a server and wait for a reply. Of course, if your browser crashes, you may lose your work, but backups are saved online. And since Picnik is web-based, you can start working on one computer and finish on another.
Picnik is completely free while in beta. When it officially launches, there will be two tiers: a free service for basic image editing, and a premium version with more features for $20/year.
It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon, out here on the edge of the prairie. Oh, wait, that's Garrison Keillor, not us. Regardless, here's some stuff that happened this week on Download Squad. 
