Underexposed

Update: I added a few more details from Picnik.

Flickr plans to expand from photo sharing to photo editing through a deal with start-up Picnik, a major change in the nature of the Yahoo site.

"We are working on a relationship with Picnik, which will be available in the coming months," a Flickr representative said Friday, declining to share further details.

Picnik said in a statement that Flickr users would get access to all the Picnik editing features within the Flickr site. "Picnik will become a seamless and tightly integrated photo editing solution for Flickr uses," the company said. "This will radically change the traditional photo-site experience: the user experience will shift from viewing to doing."

Picnik lets users perform a variety of basic editing tasks, including some color correction.

(Credit: Picnik)

News of the deal was reported Friday by TechCrunch from the Web 2.0 Summit. The site said Flickr will let users add edited photos to their accounts or, for pro account holders, they can use them to replace the online originals.

Picnik, based in Seattle, lets users perform a variety of basic editing tasks. Among them: users can crop and resize photos; change exposure, saturation, color temperature; sharpen edges; remove red-eye; and rotate pictures by 90-degrees or finer increments. It's got multiple undo levels, and edited photos already can be saved to a local computer or to Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and Google's Picasa. A "Create" tab lets users apply a variety of special effects and add borders, shapes and words, though some of those effects require a premium account.

While that feature list is pretty feeble compared with what's possible with full-fledged desktop programs such as Adobe Photoshop, it does cover the basics of image editing. Picnik isn't alone, though; Adobe is working on an online Photoshop version and other competitors include Phixr, Snipshot, Pixenate, FotoFlexer, Wiredness, Pikifx and Fauxto.

Photo editing is a significant change in scope for Flickr. The option spotlights not only the increasingly sophisticated tasks that can happen in Web browsers--a technology generally called rich Internet applications--but also the gradual migration of features from desktop computers to online services.

It's been a newsy week for Flickr at the Web 2.0 Summit. The company also said it's planning to revamp its printing feature to make it easier to print a batch of photos and add new abilities to display geographically organized photos to take better advantage of pictures that have been geotagged with location information.

SAN FRANCISCO--Flickr was originally designed for sharing photos, but Yahoo is trying to make life easier for those who want to print pictures and not just see them on a screen.

The Yahoo site is working on an upgrade to Flickr's Organize interface, which lets people select batches of photos, to make it easier to print multiple photos, said Kakul Srivastava, Flirk's director of product management. Today, each photo must be selected individually off its own Web page, which rapidly gets tiresome.

"It should be happening in the next week or so," she said in an interview here at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday. Flickr also announced plans to upgrade the site's ability to put geotagged photos to better use at the show.

The company also is trying to make printing "more interesting," expanding with new possibilities that arrived "since the world of Kodak 4x6 prints," she said. Those new options include photo cubes and photo books enabled through a partnership with Hewlett-Packard that the printer and computer maker announced at the Web 2.0 conference.

Flickr printing today feels to me like a grafted-on afterthought. And with hordes of users moving over from the shutdown of Yahoo Photos, which was more oriented toward printing than sharing, it's wise to pay attention to the feature.

Personally, I'd like to see some other printing-related features, too. Maybe you tagging gurus know a way to do this, but I tag photos when editing them on the computer, and I'd like to include a tag for the shots I'm likely to print so I can rapidly sift them out of the archive at an online site such as Flickr.

I'd also like the ability to show high-resolution versions of photos only to family and friends so they can print their favorites and I don't have to worry that somebody is going to snatch them for their own stock photo purposes. Right now I sometimes upload two versions of a photo, one private and high-resolution and one public and smaller.

Flickr has 42 million photos with geotags--information called metadata that records the location where a photo was taken--and now it's trying to let users get more out of them.

At the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield plans to demonstrate two new features, which are scheduled to debut in coming weeks. First is a revamped Flickr map page, an interface that lets people look at the photos taken at a specific location. Next is a new "places" feature that lets people explore specific geographic sites--a catalog of more than 70,000 so far.

For a look at the new pages, you can look at a gallery of Flickr screenshots we posted. And Yahoo itself is posting some information on the new feature.

The changes bring some refinement to the current world of geotagging, which is not for the faint of heart. (Though my experience has been a lot smoother once I got the time zone issue straightened out.)

Flickr's current map interface presents users with a map dotted with pink circles; a number in each circle indicates how many photos tagged with that location have been recently uploaded to Flickr. The new maps interface replaces those circles with the descriptive tags commonly used to label regional photos.

For example, some areas are likely to show tags with geographic descriptions such as "London." Others could get event-based tags that show a spurt in popularity, such as the San Francisco Bay to Breakers race, Butterfield said. Not too many words fit on a map of the world, but users can click a button to bring up a fresh supply.

"The current user interface is slow and confusing. People don't get the idea of a paging through photos in this kind of user interface," Butterfield said.

So far the tag interface appears at the global map level, but Flickr will gradually spread it to more local views, said Dan Catt, a Flickr engineer who works on the mapping technology.

The places pages offer a prepackaged view of thousands of locations. Clicking on a link on the maps page can take a user to the nearby place page, sifted to show the tag on which the user clicked. The page itself shows recent and interesting photos taken at the site, featured photographers who have photographed the region often, and popular and recent tags that lead to a new category of photos for that area.

I've been to dozens and dozens of trade shows in my nine years (gasp!) at CNET News.com, but the introductory remarks at ZendCon on Tuesday were unlike anything I've heard before.

Instead of the usual welcome statements and corporate self-congratulation, the audience was given a brief instruction in how to extend the conference activities beyond the San Francisco Airport Hyatt Regency to many corners of the Internet. Specifically, Zend set up ways to deal with Twitter, Technorati, Yahoo Flickr, Yahoo Upcoming and IRC, which despite being long in the tooth retains geek retro cred in the Linux realm.

That's fitting for an open-source company catering to PHP programmers--the kind of folks whose tools often build the Web 2.0 applications that often power the kinds of self-publishing and opinionated information sharing that Zend was trying to cultivate.

Getting the audience to help document and share conference details can help people keep track of events when not there in person. Indeed, that's precisely what Zend's new chief executive, Harold Goldberg, said he did last year to monitor ZendCon from the other side of the globe.

Zend detailed the instructions on a Web page for developers. The Twitter feed was a little dry, but the ZendCon-tagged Technorati feed shows some activity in the blogosphere--especially if you use the ZendCon tag instead of the ZendCon07 tag the organizers requested. And as of Tuesday evening, there were 117 Flickr photos, some evidently by tourists who gawked at San Francisco Bay Area attractions.