Is Adobe Systems Inc. nervous about a Web-based photo editing app that’s available to users free of charge? Not at all, according to Picnik Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Sposato. But if you spend some time on Picnik.com’s Web site, you begin to understand why this Seattle start-up’s calls tend to get returned by the heavy hitters in the imaging industry. It’s hard to convince yourself the site runs fully in a Web browser, when you’re rotating, cropping, sharpening and generally tweaking pictures in real time, moving interactive sliders and watching the results instantaneously, much in the same way you move around a Google map.

The parity between the two is no coincidence: like Google maps, Picnik (www.picknik.com) uses the so-called Web 2.0 technology to give it the slick, fully desktop app feel.



 

Upload and away you go

After creating an account on the site, the first step is uploading a photo to modify. The range of file types supported is pretty broad, and includes JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, .TGA, TIFF, XBM and PPM. There is currently a maximum file size, dimensionally equating to 2,800-by-2,800 pixels. At the time this article was written, a bug existed that resulted in errors in color translation for CMYK images, causing crushing of black levels and oversaturation of chroma. RGB images looked fine in all instances, but the conversion difficulties might certainly give pause to professionals who work exclusively in the CMYK domain.

Photo: Conley Publishing Group
After uploading a high-resolution TIFF to the Picnik online photo editing service, many common operations can be performed in a Web browser. In this example, live crop handles appear with grayed-out regions indicating the active crop area. All operations are performed in real time.
 

Upload time is of course entirely dependent on the quality and speed of the Internet connection. Reporting the  timings I personally experienced wouldn’t be terribly relevant, since a home user with a dedicated DSL or cable modem might see five or 10 times the speed of an office user on a shared T1 line. Suffice it to say that this is a very relevant example of how a “Web service” based site can use all the bandwidth you can allocate to it.

Once your photo is uploaded, you can start to experience the amazing response times the application demonstrates.  Moving a “size” slider bar results in instantaneous resizing, with no flickering or flashing of repeated server calls.

A cropping operation quickly brings into play a highlighted central area and shaded outer zone, with handles to adjust the crop. A user might think nearly all of these operations are being done on the client-side, in Flash, but according to Sposato, there is actually quite a bit of communication going on between the client and server.

 

Cutting-edge background

“That’s where the backgrounds of Darrin Massena (CTO) and Mike Harrington (co-founder) have made all the difference,” he said. “Mike co-founded Valve Software (the company behind the wildly popular video game “Half-Life” and the Steam electronic game distribution network), and Darrin received a Leonardo DaVinci award when he was at Microsoft, so here you have two guys who have been at the very cutting edge of computer imaging for a number of years.”

Another of the more impressive features of the online app is the undo function. Most Web sites approaching this degree of interactivity might have one or two levels of undo at most, but Picnik is capable of returning an image all the way back to the original upload, at any point in the process with the click of an onscreen button.

This includes circumstances such as closing the browser window, pausing for long periods of time, or if the Internet connection is suddenly interrupted and then re-established.

Once you’ve made all your desired modifications to the uploaded photo, you can save the new version locally in the image formats of JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, PDF or TIFF. There is also bi-directional interchange between the social and photo-storage sites Flickr, Picasa and Facebook.

API integration

According to Sposato, the Picnik team was able to accomplish the integration among the various sites by largely relying on  publicly available APIs.

If the company’s product catches on, Picnik will have some interesting choices to make.

The relatively new technique of being able to plug in Web services between disparate Web sites could conceivably mean that an online photo site might want to write an interface that meshes with Picnik. This could be especially attractive for businesses that have large amounts of bandwidth at their disposal and could also help these users cut costs now associated with buying and maintaining desktop imaging apps like Photoshop.

Sposato alluded to that potential issue, saying that as the company matures, it will become increasingly important to pick and choose partners very carefully, as not to expand the service faster than the technology can scale. He also claimed that the service was designed to scale right from the very beginning, and that Picnik has written the application with enough load-balancing technology to support future growth easily and inexpensively.

In the meantime, Sposato said Picnik’s site traffic has topped 2 million since it launched in March, with hundreds of thousands of registered users. An article about Picnik in late July by Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg brought a “significant spike” in traffic, Sposato said.

Hays Goodman is vice president of IT for Conley Media Group and webmaster of Newspapers & Technology. He can be reached at hgoodman@conleynet.com