Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Google acquired image editing site Picnik today. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but you can read the announcements by Picnik and Google on their respective blogs.

This is interesting to me for a few reasons.

First, Picnik is the default image editing software built into Yahoo’s photosharing site Flickr. While nobody has yet suggested that Picnik will be getting the boot from Flickr, it would seem to me an awkward relationship at best for a Yahoo property to be using a Google owned service for part of their offering. I suspect that Picnik gets dropped by Flickr and replaced with some sort of new offering.

But second, you have to ask yourself why Google would buy Picnik and why now.

The most logical application for Picnik at Google, would be for Google to integrate the software into their photo sharing property Picasa which competes with Flickr. The fact that Google would allocate $$$ towards Picasa right now may signal that they are getting serious about finally mounting some reasonable effort at trying to displace Flickr as the photo social sharing King of the internet.

What else makes me think this? Google Buzz. While I consider Flickr superior in a lot of ways to Picasa today, the biggest advantage that Flickr has always held over their competitors is how strong a grip they’ve had on the social aspect of photo sharing. But now that Buzz has arrived on the scene (and your Buzz photos go into Picasa albums by default by the way), it would appear that Google finally has a viable social network to compete with Flickr’s own internal social network inside of Flickr. By combining the social power of buzz, with an enhanced version of Picasa, Google could mount a formidable competing offering to Yahoo’s Flickr.

Personally I hope this is the case. Why? Because Flickr needs competition. Not only have they grown lazy in terms of innovation (because they can), they treat their users and their users’ data disrespectfully (because they can) censoring users and nuking whole communities on their site. With a stronger competitor out there it may force Yahoo to finally begin beefing up Flickr as well as treating their users better than they have been.

I’ve been actively using Picasa for the past few weeks after not really using them for years, mostly because of their integration with Buzz. They are still a long ways away from Flickr. Flickr today is a much more elegant offering with far better organizational capabilities and a huge body of work already on the site which carries weight. But with the right engineers hacking on Picasa and the right $$$ being allocated from Google, I’m pretty sure Picasa could in fact build a better Flickr. Combining the social sharing aspects of Buzz with a beefed up Picasa from Google, would be a formidable offering on the social photo sharing space.

Certainly integrating Picnik into Picasa (weird how their names are so similar) will enhance Picasa a bit. But here are the things I think Picasa should also be working on if they want to offer viable competition to Flickr.

1. Picasa should redesign the service around the concept of the photostream. By default Picasa only has album views. But people think in terms of streams much of the time. Flickr has a stream AND albums (sets). Picasa just has albums (and sort of clunky albums at that). By retooling the site with a photostream as a primary view, Picasa would feel more comfortable for people who wanted to migrate away from Flickr and towards Picasa. Picasa could still have albums (just like Flickr has sets), but a photostream should be the primary main view.

2. Picasa needs better organizational tools. Flickr’s organizer is *amazing*. In fact, it’s probably what I’m impressed with more than anything that they’ve ever done. The ability to batch organize photos is powerful. Picasa’s not as much. One very easy thing Picasa could do right away to improve their organizational capabilities would be to introduce SmartSets. SmartSets allow you to build albums/sets around the concept of tags. I can say, for instance, put all of my photos that are tagged/keyworded “neon” into my neon album/set. There could be better support this way for overlapping albums as well. I might have a Golden Gate Bridge album (for instance) that had all my Golden Gate Bridge photos. But those photos could also be in a SmartSet for my San Francisco photos too.

3. Picasa should make blogging photos easier. Flickr has super easy html code that you can easily cut and paste and then use to blog. Picasa allows this too but with more complicated tables that are difficult to custom size and are harder work to use. Picasa could easily copy flickr’s approach and get more traction from bloggers wanting to use Picasa to host their photos.

4. Picasa needs a better “Recent Activity” view. “Recent Activity” may be the most viewed page on Flickr for active users. Picasa needs a better way for you to easily and quickly view what’s going on with your photos. Likes/comments/tags/etc. in a central page view on Picasa.

5. Picasa needs a super easy to use Flickr-Picasa importer. Our photos belong to us. Not Flickr. So does the metadata (tags, geotags, etc.) associated with our photos. Much of this data today is trapped in the silo that is Flickr. Picasa should build an application that makes it super simple to (with the press of a button) transfer all of your Flickr photos (and metadata) easily over to Picasa. If Flickr won’t grant Picasa a commercial API key for this, then Google/Picasa should make a point of publicizing that Yahoo/Flickr is not serious about user data portability and a more open and relevant web.

There is a ton more that Picasa could do to compete with Flickr. Hopefully today’s announcement of Picnik is but a first step in a serious attempt by Google to build a viable competitor to Flickr.

Congratulations, by the way, to the Picnik team on today’s exciting announcement.

Logged into Facebook today and this is what I saw. Best viewed in original size here.

Yesterday my Pal Justin Korn posted a simple query to Google Buzz asking people to post to his Buzz if they were a photopgraher and on Buzz and so far over 100 different photographers have posted to his thread. It seems like photographers are flocking to Google’s latest social network and for good reason. Here’s another view of many of these photographers from Justin’s blog.

Buzz displays your photos much more elegantly than they do on Flickr. As you upload your photos to Flickr, or Google’s Picasa (where I’ve started getting more active myself), your photos are imported into Buzz as a stream of nice looking large sized thumbnail images. But here’s where it gets better. Click on an image and Buzz loads up the image’s full large size, in all it’s glory. I don’t know about you, but I love looking at images really big *much* more than I enjoy looking at the medium sized 500 px default that Flickr shows. Rather than have to leave the page that I’m on (like on Flickr to see an image big) I can instead just advance through the images with the keyboard one by one.

Each image includes a link back to flickr/picasa where if I want to I can click on the link and it will open that image in a new tab on my browser to go fave or comment on or do whatever I want on flickr/picasa.

While you are on Buzz you can “like” a photographers import, or comment on it, or whatever. I’m finding that Buzz is every bit as social as a site like Flickr is for photographers and am having some really great conversations about my own work. If you are a photographer, come join us.

Are you a photographer and on Buzz? Then definitely post your info to Justin’s thread above. Are you a photographer and not on Buzz yet? What are you waiting for, come on over, the water’s nice. It’s another great place to showcase your work. Even if you don’t have the time or inclination to spend time socially interacting on Buzz, you still might want to at least link it up to your Flickrstream so that people that want to follow your work on Buzz still can.

If you’d like to follow my stuff on Buzz you can find me here. I’m going to be very active on Buzz in the days and weeks ahead.

My Pal Carlos Miller runs what is probably the best blog in the world right now chronicling problems and issues that photographers have with legal photography, Photography is Not a Crime. Carlos regularly publishes stories about photographer harassment, arrest and other unfortunate situations in order to shed light on the important rights that we all ought to have to pursue our legal constitutionally protected right to photograph in public. He provides a valuable blog and service for all photographers.

Carlos is out of Miami and his blog is running right now in 2nd place for the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper’s best overall blog contest. It’s sort of a pain in the neck because you have to actually register with the Sun Sentinel in order to vote for his blog, but I did it and I hope you consider doing it to. If you care about photographer right’s his blog is doing a great service for all of us and it would be nice for him to get some recognition down in Florida from the mainstream press for it.

If you’d like to vote for his blog you can learn how to do that at this post here.