Picnik Shutdown Getting Closer

The announced shutdown of Picnik, scheduled for April 19th 2012 is getting closer. Picnik is/was an online photo editing and publishing tool. Usable through a browser, Picnik had both a free and a premium paid for offering. In 2010 Picnik became part of Google.

This morning I received an email from Picnik reminding me of the imminent shutdown date and giving me advice on how to export my images and content.

Here's the message:

Important Picnik Announcement 

As we announced earlier this year, we will be closing Picnik on April 19th, 2012, and we want to make sure you have the information and support you need.
For more details on our shut down, or recommended alternatives to Picnik, please see answers to frequently asked questions.
Refund update for Picnik Premium
We have submitted all refunds for processing. For the few who have not received their refund, please do the following:

• Confirm you have not mistaken your refund for a new Picnik charge
• Contact the original financial institution you used to purchase your Picnik Premium membership to confirm they have received the refund notification
• If these steps don't resolve your issue, contact us by logging into your account and clicking Help.  Please contact us prior to our April 19th closure.

Picnik Premium
Picnik Premium will continue to be free for everyone until our closing date. So please keep creating!
Grabbing your photos
If you would like to remove your images from Picnik, please use Picnik Takeout to easily download your photos to your desktop in convenient zip files. You may request downloads as many times as you like until our closing date of April 19, 2012. If you choose to zip up now, you can still use Picnik and remove any new edits though April 19th. Make sure you can open your downloaded zip files. If you have any problems, please contact feedback-data@picnik.com.
Thank you,
Team Picnik

The Picnik website also doesn't let you miss the fact that the service is shutting down soon. Here's how it looks:

Difficult to not get the message.

I had used Picnik for a while after discovering the service on the Chrome Web Store. Nowadays many of the features in Picnik are offered as part of the photo service Picasa/Google Plus Photos. Hopefully all the rest of the features will be rolled over, then it will make sense to kill off the extra (little known by the general public) brand.

As usual, fell free to leave comments and/or questions below.

Don's Golf Drive at 50 fps [Photo]

Here's a slideshow of 50 photos I took with my Panasonic TZ20 in "Burst Mode".


I took the pictures in High Dynamic Mode (Artistic Setting) and in Burst Mode (50 fps).


The album was uploaded from my Ubuntu Linux laptop to Picasa Web Albums using Shotwell Photo Manager. The slideshow for this blog post was created using the Picasa Web Albums "Share As Slideshow" option.

Ka-Chink!

As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions below. Please also Google +1 the article too.

A New Jolicloud Later This Year

Last night a tweet popped up in my Twitter stream from the official Jolicloud account.

"A new Jolicloud is coming this fall, register for the beta: jolicloud.com"

Of course the first thing I did was head over to http://www.jolicloud.com/ and register. The Jolicloud homepage is now openly inviting users to register for the beta of the service.

I registered and updated the details of which platforms I use and will be using Jolicloud on, and that was it! Easy Peasy! (No pun towards the Ubuntu Netbook derivative intended...)

So as I continue to use Jolicloud through the web browser on my Desktop/Laptop machine, and as an OS on  a partition of my netbook, I'm looking forward to seeing what Tariq Krim and the rest of the clever people working on Jolicloud are going to come up with.

You can read more about Jolicloud 1.2 here. As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions at the end of this post. If you liked and/or found this post useful, please also Google +1 it.