picnik comes with a free-to-use image editing API for your website
category: .net, PHP, Ruby on Rails, classic ASP (VBScript), tools
Ever heard from Picnik? It allows you editing your images direclty within your browser. Forget Adobe Photoshop :) Picnik has been around for a while now but recently it started to offer its service for the public. for free! I played around a bit and must say that it is amazing .. Use it within PHP, classic ASP, .net, Ruby on Rails or whatever... especially i like the idea of the whole service which works like this...
- Send your images to their service (existing image via URL or encoded as multi-part)
- Then the user modifies the picture (size, colors, rotation, special effects...)
- Picnik sends you the picture back to your server (either an URL where you can download it or directly as multi-part image)
Here comes an example I have built for demonstration...Click on the picture below to edit it.
Everything realized by using a link to this URL:
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http://www.picnik.com/service/
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?_apikey=178ef7667a0c301dd8eb89e76caba626
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&_import=http%3A//www.webdevbros.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/googleapple.jpg
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&_export=http%3A//www.webdevbros.net/2008/01/23/picnik-comes-with-a-free-to-use-image-editing-api-for-your-website
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&_export_title=back%20to%20webdevbros
Pretty cool isn't it? Thats the basic example but you can customize a lot more (see their API). Also I didn't progress the picture back on my server.
If you want to get started i recommend to start with their tutorials. They are nicely written and done in 10 minutes.



