I took a brief look at this, and it does seem like serious competition for Snipshot. The Snipshot guys need to get on the ball and implement red-eye reduction. That's the biggest issue for point-and-shoot photographers.
Snipshot does cropping better -- It's more intuitive to constrain to the photo's original proportions. Snipshot also works entirely in JavaScript -- no flash plugin required.
I recently added an option for ourdoings.com users to integrate with Snipshot. I'll keep an eye on picnik too, though. They also have an API.
Just tried Snipshot to compare. Looks like Snipshot, like most online photo-editing apps, renders changes at the server. So there's a lag between when you change something (e.g. the exposure) and when you can see the result.
Picnik appears to be doing it in client-side Actionscript. The real-time rendering (image changes as you drag the slider) makes it much more usable for photo-editing. I can actually use an online photo-editing app now!
For my purposes server-side is more useful. My site is for casual photographers, people whose photos are mainly for sharing their doings. For them it makes much more sense to get the photos out there in a timely manner, then go through and crop, etc., when time allows.
For even a moderately-sized digital photo (2MB these days), downloading and especially uploading is slow. It's much faster for snipshot.com to talk to ourdoings.com.
We just got a digital photo frame yesterday, and it's pulling family shots from ourdoings.com. Those frames draw attention to the need for good cropping much better than a web page does.
The way snipshot constrains proportions by default when cropping is helpful. If picnik users forget to choose the appropriate option, they'll end up with a line of thumbnails that are all different.
That said, I still think redeye is a big issue. Also, as broadband gets better the difference between client and server-side image editing will become less important.
Wow, this is pretty slick. Never thought I'd use an online-based photo editing tool, but I can see myself using this when I don't want to open up Photoshop on my other computer just to make a quick crop/edit to something.
Snipshot does cropping better -- It's more intuitive to constrain to the photo's original proportions. Snipshot also works entirely in JavaScript -- no flash plugin required.
I recently added an option for ourdoings.com users to integrate with Snipshot. I'll keep an eye on picnik too, though. They also have an API.