Picnik: editing photos online

Personal media continues to saturate every niche of our culture; when grandma is managing the digital photos of her grandkids, you know we're reaching a saturation point. 

Regarding editing photos, there is a wide spectrum of solutions, from high-end software like Photoshop and its highly capable little cousin, Elements, to the software that gets included with the little point-and-shoot camera that grandma uses.  There are also a number of web-based photo-editing sites.

Picnik appears to be one of the very best out there, and Flickr concurs.  It's very easy to use, has a number of useful features, such as rotate, crop, resize, color exposure and more, and you can try it for free without signing up for an account. 

When a client of mine has the occasional need to put a photo on their website, and needs to resize it first, I am now recommending Picnik, because it's interface is highly intuitive for even the least tech-literate of the bunch.

The above photo is from stock.xchng (another one of my favorite sites), and is royalty-free.  I found the photo I wanted (original here), and inputted the URL into Picnik, which grabbed the photo for me.  I then played with the color, cropped it, added rounded edges, faded the edges and added a semi-transparent big blue paw print.  Then I saved it to my computer and uploaded it to this site.  It was all easy and free.  Sweet.