Nothing earthshattering is going on here: As shown in the screenshots below, if viewing a photo in Picasa Web albums you’ll get a link that lets you edit it in Picnik without any further sign-in process. Once you’re there you can crop, rotate, tweak, apply effects and text, and perform other tasks.

Picnik saves some of its best features (and unlimited access to photos you’ve uploaded) for premium accounts accounts that cost $24.95 a year. When Google bought the service, I wondered if it would follow its past pattern and make the service completely free. So far, it hasn’t–but if you have a premium account, you’ll get access to all its tools when you edit a photo in Picasa Web Albums.

The Picnik/Picasa integration is similar to a deal that Picnik has with Yahoo’s Flickr; Picnik founder and Google Photo Products Product Manager Jonathan Sposato told me that there are no plans for the Flickr relationship to go away now that Picnik is owned by Yahoo archrival Google.

As before, Picnik requires Flash. Sposato told me that Google is interested in the idea of eventually using HTML5 and other technologies to bring the service to platforms and devices beyond Web browsers on traditional PCs, but he didn’t have any specific news in that department.

And speaking of Picnik, the service rolled out Picnik Basket, a new set of features for combining multiple photos into one image, today. In the free version of Picnik, they’re pretty basic–you get a few template grids for placing multiple pictures on a page, and can tweak their “kookiness” (whether they’re not skewed on the page, skewed a little, or skewed a lot).

But the really cool Picnik Basket features are reserved for Picnik’s for-pay Premium version (which costs a reasonable $25 a year). You get more collage templates in Premium, but you also get free-form features for dragging photos on top of each other, layering them, rotating them, and making them semi-transparent, and you can easily combine these effects with text, borders, and other Picnik effects. (The collage features, by contrast, are in a stand-alone section of Picnik that’s isolated from the other functionality.)

Picnik Baskets could be even cooler: I’d love to be able to apply effects to any of the photos on a page directly, for instance. Suggestion to Picnik: It would be pretty neat if double-clicking on a photo in a composition brought it up for editing. (You can apply effects to any photo, but you need to do it before you drag it onto the page, then save it.)

And Picnik Baskets were slightly quirky when I tried them just now–I occasionally had to drag a photo into a collage or onto the page twice to get it to work.

Overall, though, I’m impressed with Picnik Baskets and even more impressed with Picnik in it’s entirety. It’s among the very best Web applications I know of, and it might be the single best one that’s done in Flash. The features are impressive; the user interface is both functional and fun; as I mentioned above, it’s not 100% reliable, but it comes much closer than most Web applications. Whenever I use it, I’m not frustrated by the limitations of Web apps–instead, I’m excited about their present and even more so about their future…

But I’m still learning things from this project, and need to catch up on sharing them with you. Some notes on the last few days:

–I should have mentioned I’ve been using Meebo. When I’m on my MacBook Pro, I generally use iChat for instant messaging. But I’ve sometimes opted for Meebo for just about as long as there’s been a Meebo. And in almost every respect that matters, I like it just as much as iChat. (Exception: iChat is smart enough to reconnect automatically whenever I connect to the Internet; with Meebo, I need to remember to log in…and sometimes I forget.) Meebo is among the very best Web apps on the planet–it’s one of the ones that first made me think it might be possible to live inside the browser.

–A cool use for Google Docs. When I started to put together The State of iPhone Satisfaction, I knew I wanted to turn survey results into infographics. I ended up doing so with Google Docs–and it was not only an adequate Excel substitute but a superior one in some respects, since it lets you “publish” a chart in a form that you can embed in any Web page, and which auto-updates if you change the data behind the chart. Excel would have let me create prettier. more customizable charts, but getting them onto the Web and into my article would have been a lot tougher. (Zoho, incidentally, has a similar publishing feature, but its charting features don’t provide a real-time preview, making them more of a chore to use.)

–Can’t any online spreadsheet open my file? My Google Docs charts were based on summary data from my iPhone survey. But I also downloaded all the responses from all 2158 participants from PollDaddy in the form of a 2MB .CSV file. I then tried to upload it into Google Docs–and was reminded that Google Docs can only import spreadsheets up to 1MB. So I tried Zoho–which told me that one of the file’s field names was too long, and gave up. Whereupon I moved onto ThinkFree, and discovered, after a week with the Mini-Note, that it didn’t have Java installed. (There was a time when you’d find that out really, really quickly.) I installed Java, and…ThinkFree successfully opened my file. It wasn’t a perfect experience–the ThinkFree spreadsheet mysteriously pauses in places where Excel reponds instantly–but ThinkFree gets major brownie points for working where Google Docs and Zoho didn’t. (Surely big companies like GE that are adopting Web suites need to import big files; I wonder what they do?)

–Graphics continue to be tricky. I still haven’t found a way to whip up little images for my posts that’s anywhere near as easy and powerful as Photoshop. Aviary continues to look terrific in principle, but I keep building graphics in it and then getting an ugly, uninformative error message when I try to save them. (I did manage to use it to put together the image with this post.) So I keep coming back to Picnik, which is a photo editor that’s really not designed to do the sort of things I’m trying to accomplish. But it’s extremely reliable, and I’m usually able to approximate the effects I want. I used Picnik to create my iPhone Survey logo (settling for a font other than Rockwell Bold, which I usually use–it wasn’t available) and this image. But mostly, I’ve been trying to steal graphics from the Web that only need cropping and/or resizing, and reusing old images I’d created in Photoshop, such as my “Operation Foxbook” logo.

(Full disclosure: In certain cases, I cheated a little on Operation Foxbook’s no-desktop app rule by doing a screen capture, then pasting it into Windows Paint and saving it so I could upload it into Picnik. As far as I know, there’s no way to bring a screen grab into any Web image editor without using a desktop app to save it disk first.)

I have a new appreciation for how good Picnik is, but I’ll also be very happy to get my mitts back on Photoshop; no Web-based rival comes close.

I’m going to record at least a few final thoughts on Operation Foxbook in one final post. But come to think of it, even when I turn my MacBook Pro back on and use desktop software without guilt, I wanna continue to do an awful lot of my work in the browser. Maybe I’ll continue to label relevant posts with the Operation Foxbook logo, and let the experiment continue on indefinitely…

How’s it going so far? Not bad, but not entirely free of bumps. A few notes on the Web-based applications I’ve been using:

Blogging: Technologizer is based on the wonderful WordPress platform. I’ve gone through periods of writing blog posts in desktop tools such as Ecto, but lately I’ve just been writing directly into WordPress. No changes in my habits required here.

E-Mail: I’ve been tending to bop back and forth between Apple’s desktop Mail app and Gmail (into which I route both my personal and Technologizer mail) in recent months. For the duration of Operation Facebook, I’ll just skip the bopping and work in Gmail. It ain’t perfect, but it’s more than up to the task.

Calendar: Actually, when I want to check my schedule, I’m as likely to do it on my iPhone as on a computer. When I do use the computer, I’ve usually done so with Apple’s iCal. But I use MobileMe to sync the iPhone and iCal, and it also gives me a Web-based calendar service that looks and behaves much like iCal. I should be in good shape there.

Image processing: Here’s where things get tricky. I do most of my image wrangling for Technologizer in Photoshop–it’s probably the most purely desktop-centric work I do.

Yesterday, I needed to grab and edit an image of the logo for Google’s Android OS for a post I was working on. With Photoshop out of the picture, I decided to try Aviary, an impressive-looking suite of graphics tools that wasn’t available when I wrote a review of Web-based image editors for PC World a couple of months ago. Aviary is impressive–unlike most online image editors, it’s aimed at pros rather than casual shutterbugs, and comes closer to feeling like a plausible Photoshop substitute than any other Web image editor I’ve seen…counting Adobe’s own Photoshop Express.

I brought a copy of the Android logo into Aviary’s Phoenix image editor, cropped and resized it…and got an error message when I tried to export it so I could bring it into WordPress. Oops. Aviary still looks extremely neat, so I’m going to come back to it. But I had work to get done, so I hopped over to Picnik, the image editor I named as a Best Bet for my PCW review. Picnik doesn’t set out to replace Photoshop, but for what it tries to do, it’s one of the best-designed Web apps of any sort I’ve ever used. And I was able to get the Android logo into shape with it in a couple of minutes.

I was going to write in this post about the experience of dumping the big, powerful, expensive MacBook Pro for small, simple, and cheap Mini-Note, but that really deserves a post of its own. Which I’ll write soon. Stay tuned for that and more of Operation Foxbook as the experiment continues…

I happen to be working on a review of Web-based image editors for PC World. and found that a couple of them weren’t working today. One, the excellent Picnik, says that S3 is to blame. (I have a hunch that the other one also leverages S3, but I’m not positive.) The outages are a hassle–hey, I have a deadline to meet–but they’re also a sobering and useful reminder that Web-based services are extremely dependent on a lot of complicated technology and infrastructure working properly. Picnik may be problematic today, but my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements, an old-fashioned piece of desktop software, is working just fine.

Not that desktop software is invulnerable: If my motherboard or hard drive croaked right now (and they could!) I’d be denied access to Elements until I solved things myself. All things being equal, it should make sense to throw technical challenges like keeping software working at a big company like Amazon or Google or Yahoo or Microsoft.

But it’s fascinating and sobering to see that Amazon–a company with oodles of resources, armies of techies, and, one hopes, a sophisticated game plan for keeping its services chugging along even when things go wrong–can fall victim to technical gremlins like this. The Amazon Web Services site refers to the Amazon platform as “robust,” and it is, mostly…but “robust” is not a synonym for “failsafe.”) With S3 as popular as it is, an awful lot of customers of an awful lot of services were inconvenienced today, even if they didn’t know that S3 was to blame. (In many cases, they didn’t: The error messages I got at Picnik didn’t mention S3, and I only learned they related to it when I checked out the Picnik blog,)

S3 suffered another major outage back in February, so this current one isn’t unprecendented in the least. I wonder if any of the companies that use S3 will reconsider the proposition. And I hope that Amazon explains exactly what happened and what steps it’s taking to prevent it from happening again.

(Wacky postscript: I uploaded an image of the Amazon Web Services logo to use with this post, and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t displaying. Yup–WordPress.com uses S3, too.If you see an empty rectangle at the top of this post, S3 is still sickly; if you see the Amazon Web Services logo, it’s a good sign that it’s feeling healthier. I’ll say it again: When Amazon S3 goes boom, so does the Web…)