I love pictures. It makes sense; my father is a photographer, so I had access to cameras from early on, and my current setup is a Nikon D70 and a Canon SD1000. One big, one tiny. I use flickr to store and share my photos, and use shutterfly to print them. I often have prints shipped to me, and then choose the cream of the crop and send them to my grandmother in Texas, or my sister in Colorado. If my house burns down, I will not pine for the photos of my daughter — they are safely stored in two different locations, online.

One of the best things to happen to photography — especially for frugal folks like myself — is the free photo editor found at Picnik.com. You can add text, adjust colors, add special effects, all online, all free. It integrates seamlessly with flickr.com, Facebook, Picasa Albums, and other photo services. It’s great.

This year, when it came time to design our annual New Year’s card, I was unimpressed with the offering at Shutterfly. Other services were very expensive. All I wanted was a nice, simple, 5×7 flat card with our family photo on it. Enter Picnik.

I uploaded the photo to flickr, and went to Picnik to edit it. I adjusted the contrast, added a border, and added my own text. By making each word its own text box, I was able to adjust the size and float it the way I wanted it to look. I saved it back to flickr (being sure to ’save a new copy,’ as the default is to replace the photo you’ve just edited) and then decided to try flickr’s print services. I ordered a proof to be sent to my local Target (just 1.49, but only available in glossy, which is not my preference), picked it up the same day, and then went home and ordered the rest via flickr’s print services, for just .59 per photo — 40 cents less than Shutterfly, and $1.40 less than the designer cards. Even better — I could order just what I needed, and not be restricted to sets of 25. I’ll have to pick up some envelopes, but I already have some left from last year’s unused cards.

That’s just one way to use Picnik. Have a photo of a class presentation that you’d like to use, but you need to mask out a child that has forbidden photos? Picnik will let you cover him over, easily. Need to resize a photo for an avatar, and you don’t want it squished? Picnik will do that.

And, for just $25 a year, you can access Picnik Premium, which gives you no ads, more options, and additional tools, including curves!

Picnik

I love my Flickr account. If my house burns down, my daughter’s photos are not my first-concern-after-people, because any photo I’ve deemed good enough to print has been uploaded to Flickr (and to Shutterfly), and I can always get them back. There’s a million good reasons to use Flickr, but that’s my main one.

I also like Facebook — it’s a nice portal to all of the various strands of my life, where I can connect the past and present, and list all of my various projects, as well. It’s a little bit of Twitter, a little bit of MySpace, a little bit of Flickr, and a little bit of Classmates.com. (Remmber them?)

As someone who already uploads photos to two different sites, I don’t want to upload them to Facebook, too, since I figure people should be able to click on my Flickr link in my account, right? But not everyone does, and that doesn’t work with tagging. Enter Flickr2Facebook. It’s a simple app, and only requires a little bookmarklet in your favorites to work. Now I can copy photos from Flickr over to my Facebook albums with great ease. It’s now my favorite Facebook utility app, and you should check it out, too.

Flickr2Facebook

Google is so much more than just search, as many people know, and one of their services that I’ve been playing with recently is Google Forms. There are many uses for setting up a form — you can create a survey or poll, have folks self-populate a contact list, enter all of your travel expenses — and google makes it very easy. The results are stored in a google spreadsheet, accessible from anywhere, and there is even a tool to analyze your answers.

My first public form is set up to survey people about the price of heating oil here in Maine — a concern shared by most everyone I know.  I embedded it into a page to make it easy to find, and easy to fill out. Check it out! (And if you are a Mainer who’s bought oil, fill it out, too! It’ totally anonymous.)

Maine Oil Prices