Picnik goes half way to a secure link to Picasa Web Albums

When the Picasa Web Albums API launched last week, one of the listed example services making use of the API was the photo manipulation site Picnik.

However, it was a poor example of how to do things, in that when you went to the Picnik site, it asked you for your Google account and password so that it could use them to access your account.  I hope that no-one gave them these credentials - there is no excuse for asking for them when Google provide a proper authentication mechanism which means that you only ever authenticate with Google, never entering your details into a third party site.

I'm glad to say that Picnik has now started to use the proper authentication mechanism - passing you off to a secure page at Google when it becomes necessary to log in. 

However, there's still room for improvement - they currently have not bothered to properly register with Google, so that once you have logged in you get a warning

This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you continue the process only if you trust the following destination:
http://www.picnik.com/callback/picasaweb

So still work to do there, but certainly moving in the right direction.

The Picnik application provides a Flash based UI - so much of it breaks the conventions we have come to expect from the web (such as middle click to open in new window), but it does seem to have done a fair job at integrating with Picasa Web Albums.  As well as showing you the contents of albums from which you can select items to process in Picnik, you can also use the interface to rename (that is update the captions) or delete items from your albums.  Once you have manipulated images in Picnik, you can also save the resulting image back to Picasa Web Albums.

Images saved in this way are tagged with a "picnik" tag - there are currently 177 photos tagged picnik in the Community Search at Picasa Web Albums.

I also found a few bugs apparent in this beta application (for example the "I'm doing something animation" shows some rotating gears and always says "renaming"), and the chunky Flash interface has a habit of truncating text and not giving you any way to see the full text (such as in names of albums).