I’m a huge fan of Picnik. I can do so many cool things with it. It’s snappy, fun, and easy. Now I saw on both RWW and Photojojo reviews of Aviary and it’s online photo editor Phoenix and my first question was (and sorta still is) is it worth $95/yr (for the high-end package, the “Green” package is $8/mo)?
RWW has a pretty comprehensive review of the tool:
Aviary is indeed a very comprehensive image editing suite. While testing the different applications, we were impressed with the overall speed of the service and how closely the apps resembled more traditional desktop tools. While the feature set of Phoenix, the core program in the suite, doesn’t quite rival that of more fully-featured desktop applications like Photoshop or even Paint.NET, the combination of all the Aviary apps makes this suite an attractive alternative.
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Like most of its free rivals like FotoFlexer or Picnik, Aviary can import pictures from most of the popular online photo-sharing sites, including Flickr, Facebok, and Picasa. Its features, however, go far beyond the functionality of these free online applications and the Peacock application allows you to experiment with images in ways that no other online application has allowed you to do so far. Source: Online Image Editing Suite Aviary Comes Out of Private Beta (Discount for RWW Readers) – ReadWriteWeb
Picnik is $25/yr (disclosure I got a free year at Gnomedex this year, but was more than ready to pay for it) so for an extra $70 you get powerful editing tools. Yep layers and stuff. That is cool. Could you have even imagined that even last year? I have to give them props.
Regardless is a powerful tool like this good for the web? What about just download GIMP or something?
I’ve signed up for an account and will give it a shot. It’s not something that I’d use very often. My only gripe right now is that I only have 48 hrs to claim the Photojojo $55 discount (BTW Photojojo was given more discount code links than RWW), I’d like a lot more time to test. Heck SmugMug gave people infinite time on their “Flickr refugee discount”.
What would rock is an online RAW processor, course uploading like 11 megs to the cloud might be a little much. Which makes it cool that I found a RAW processor for Ubuntu (UFRaw) and even installed it myself.
As a final note I’m glad to see that Aviary has a “regular blog”, “business blog” and twitter accounts.
Tris Hussey is a writer, teacher, blogger, and speaker on all facets of Internet life, WordPress, and social media. He is the author of Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Blogging Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro and Using WordPress.
