Picnik

» see picnik.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

picnik launched publicly in march 2007 from a small seattle team led by jonathan sposato. it was a photo editor that ran entirely inside flash in your browser. you uploaded a jpeg or pulled it from picasa web albums, flickr, photobucket, or facebook, and a few seconds later you had crop and rotate, levels and color, red-eye and skin-smoothing, a panel of faux-vintage frames. there was nothing to install. you closed the tab and the editor disappeared.

flickr embedded a stripped-down version in december 2007 as its default in-browser editor. that was the deal that put picnik in front of seventy-some million flickr users. it became the editor that millions of photo dumps actually got finished in. yahoo's flickr team got an editor without writing one, picnik got a torrent of users, the math worked.

i used picasa heavily through this whole stretch (covered separately on this site) and picnik was the editor that lived inside picasa web albums after the 2010 google acquisition. on a windows tower in ankara, ttnet broadband, picasa scanning the canon dumps and picnik fixing the obvious mistakes. it was the part of the stack you stopped noticing because it just worked. it was also a flash dependency the whole time.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the original pitch in 2007 was that adobe photoshop elements cost $99 and most people did not need it. they needed to fix red-eye in three clicks and put a vintage frame around a holiday photo. picnik did exactly that, in flash, in a browser tab, on any operating system. macromedia had shipped flash 9 the year before with the actionscript 3 vm that made this kind of bitmap manipulation tolerable in a browser, and picnik was one of the apps that proved the platform.

the freemium model was sensible. the basic editor was free. picnik premium was $24.95 a year and added extra effects plus batch editing. flickr's bundled version was deliberately stripped of premium features so picnik kept the upsell path. by 2009 picnik had millions of monthly active users without ever running a tv ad.

~ the origin ~

google acquired picnik on 1 march 2010 for an undisclosed sum, brought the team into the picasa web albums group, and made picnik premium free for everyone. for two years it was the in-browser editor for every photo a google user touched. it was a striking thing for a small seattle company to ship at that scale. it was also a hint at where google wanted to go with photos.

the timing was unkind. by 2010 mobile was eating photo editing. instagram launched in october of that year. flash was already a known dead-product-walking on iphone, and apple had spent the previous year publicly arguing that flash should not exist on phones. picnik's whole stack was the wrong stack for where photos were actually moving.

~ the actual end ~

google announced the shutdown on 18 january 2012. the service stopped accepting new users that day. the full takedown landed on 19 april 2012, with picnik premium converted to refund-only. the official explanation was that google was moving picnik's tools into google+ creative kit, where flash dependency could be replaced by html5. user-saved data could be downloaded for another year, until 19 april 2013, after which the servers went off.

flickr's bundled picnik was replaced by aviary's html5 editor on the day of the picnik shutdown. two former picnik engineers left google in early 2012 to start picmonkey, which kept the picnik aesthetic alive in html5 for the next decade until shutterfly rolled it up. the picnik domain redirected to a google+ help page that itself got killed when google+ shut down in 2019.

~ what got buried with it ~

the in-browser flash editor as a category. picnik was the highest-quality entry, and after it died nobody attempted the same thing in flash because flash itself was on the schedule. html5 canvas eventually did the same job, but the warmth of the picnik ui and the speed of the workflow took a long time to replicate. picmonkey was the closest, and it was a nostalgic homage rather than a successor.

a small generation of people learned what photo editing was inside picnik, then graduated to lightroom or instagram. the people who never graduated and just wanted "fix the red eye and add a frame" lost a tool and never found a one-to-one replacement. that is the user mostly invisible to product strategy: not a power user, just someone who needed the obvious thing to work in a tab.

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