Computer Support Blog

Serious photographers who live on the cheap and use computers for their digital photography are feeling the squeeze.  One of the best sites for altering digital photographs is closing down on April 19, 2012 and the virtual world of the Internet will be a little worse off for it.  The site is called Picnik and is has announced that it will be ending service soon, sending many photographers scrambling.

Picnik is, at least for the next few weeks, a free website where you could alter photographs you took.  The site was simple.  You uploaded a picture to their site, where Picnik provided tools to crop, resize, alter lighting and color settings, reduce red eye and do several other alterations to your photograph.  When you had the picture looking the way you liked it, you could download your altered picture and move on to more pictures.  This was a wonderful alternative to expensive, licensed programs like Adobe Photoshop or Photo Explosion.  Through Picnik, you could transform the photo you actually took into the photo you wanted it to be.

Picnik provided so many tools that were previously offered only through licensed software for free.  For sure, Picnik had a premium side, too.  When you paid for Picnik’s service, Picnik gave you storage space and a few premium tools.  But for basic photo manipulations, Picnik was an essential site for thrifty photographers.

Picnik is not simply shutting down.  The websites tools are being absorbed into the Google+ framework.  While this might not seem like a big deal – “Just join Google+ and quit whining” is a common refrain those who lament the impending demise of Picnik hear – Picnik users are right to gripe.  They should not be compelled to join a social network just to keep using the tools they have become familiar with and find comfortable.  There are many reasons to not want to join a social network and keeping photographs private is a compelling and reasonable reason.  One need only look at the new Facebook Timeline to see how pictures posted to the Internet may come back to haunt you.

Why does it matter if Picnik’s tools will still be available on Google+?  Google is a multibillion dollar company that has publicly traded stock.  That means that Google, more than anything, is a business following is business model.  While art and business are not mutually exclusive, the rights of artists and ease of access to artistic tools frequently, quickly get dumped when business concerns are the predominate motivation for an institution.  As a result, Picnik users have no reasonable guarantee that should Google decide they can make more money by charging for the tools Picnik used to offer for free, they will not exercise that profit motive.  With the lifespan of social networks measured in years, as opposed to decades, foresighted Picnik users have to ask where the tools they have enjoyed for free will end up when Google+ is just a memory as distant as Picnik.

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