Adobe’s Photoshop Express is a great online photo editor, no doubt about that, but it’s not free (as in free beer). In exchange for using Photoshop Express, Adobe wants your photos.
If you read the General Terms, you’ll find under point 8. Use of Your Content. letter a. the following paragraph [via SPON]:
Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.
As I understand it, Adobe, for instance, reserves the rights to sublicense your photos in Adobe Stock Photos to third parties. Without sharing the revenue with you of course. After all, Adobe already offered you its service Adobe Photoshop Express for “free”.
To me, that’s a show stopper for using Adobe Photoshop Express. Luckily there are other excellent online photo editors around who don’t claim such farreaching rights on your content like Adobe does: picnik, pixer.us or flauntR to name only a few of them.
It took a TechCrunch post to direct my attention to Picnik, an amazing online photo editor. Among other photo services, it already integrates very well with Flickr using the Flickr authentication API. You can retrieve from Flickr, edit in Picnik and save back to Flickr seamlessly. Apparently the Flickr user interface will get another button soon to make the editing process with Picnik even more easier.
My first thought was that I won’t need iPhoto anymore. Ever since I bought the DSLR I only use iPhoto to manage the snapshots I take with my smaller camera. If I’m going to upload directly from my smaller camera to Flickr and do rudimentary editing like cropping and basic color adjustments there in Picnik, which does an excellent job as I found out last weekend, I could skip iPhoto entirely. The Flickr-Picnik workflow should work at least as good as the workflow in iPhoto.
Technically no problem but there would still be this unpleasant feeling in my stomach region of giving the control over my images totally out of my hands. Stomach says no, so I rather stay some more time with the local iPhoto library as primary library and the Flickr account as secondary “fun” library.
However, Picnik will be a great addition to Flickr and I’m pretty looking forward to it!
Facebook is telling me I’m online while viewing my profile. Hmm, that’s interesting, why is it saying I’m online? Are there actually people not knowing they are online when they access a website?
The situation reminded me of Steve Krug’s web usability bible “Don’t Make Me Think!”: because of telling me I’m online I started thinking if I could view my profile without being online. It won’t be possible, right? So why does Facebook then say I’m online when there is no other option to view my profile. Note: users must log-in to see anything more than Facebook’s welcome screen. So there really is no other option like being logged-off and going through profiles.