You can now edit your photos with Picnik right on Photosleeve! If you’re not familiar with Picnik…

Picnik is photo editing awesomeness, online, in your browser. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

Picnik does a great job of making photo editing simple and fun. Plus they get bonus points since they’re another Seattle startup. :)

To try out Picnik on Photosleeve, sign in and then click the Edit with Picnik link while viewing an individual photo.

While you’re editing, make sure that you check out both the Edit and Create tabs. Edit lets you do the basics, like cropping and red-eye reduction. Create lets you do a bunch more, like applying effects and adding text and shapes.

When you’re done, click Save to Photosleeve. We don’t overwrite your original, since the photo that Picnik sends back might not be as high quality as the huge original we send them. If you know that you don’t want to keep the original photo though, go ahead and delete it.

Happy Picniking!

Derek & Ryan

When you upload photos to Photosleeve, we automatically rotate your photos so that you don’t have to. For example, if you held the camera sideways to take a portrait, then we rotate the photo so that the long dimension runs up and down.

Since we weren’t standing there on your last vacation, we have to rely on the camera telling us how you were holding the camera when you took the photo. Unfortunately, not all cameras can do this.

In order for the camera to tell which direction you’re holding it, it must have an orientation sensor. If you’re curious about whether a particular camera has an orientation sensor, the easiest way to find out is by searching Digital Photography Review - they have detailed specifications for most popular cameras. If they don’t have specs for your camera, you’ll have to check the booklet or manufacturer’s site.

If your camera has an orientation sensor, Photosleeve should be able to automatically rotate your photos. Bear in mind, however, that the sensor does make mistakes, especially if you’re shooting at an extreme up or down angle. If your camera does not have an orientation sensor (or if it makes a mistake), you’ll need to manually rotate the photo to fix it. Rotation is available on the individual photo page or on the dragbar (so you can drag down a bunch of photos and rotate them all at once).

Photosleeve always preserves the original digital photo from your camera. So when doing automatic or manual rotation, the original is preserved in its unrotated form. In other words, we never modify the original. Rotation just affects the way the photo is displayed when browsing.

If you’re thinking about buying a new camera: please, please, please don’t buy a camera without an orientation sensor. There is no reason that you should have to spend time rotating all of your photos manually.

We’ve been really surprised at the number of cameras so far that do not have orientation sensors. As far as we can tell, Canon seems to have included orientation sensors in most (all?) of its models over the last few years.

Derek & Ryan

Captioning your photos on Photosleeve is really really easy.

Just click on the text or the pencil,

Enter your new caption,

And then click ok,

This is great when you’re just captioning one photo, but it can be a pain if you’re trying to caption all the photos in an album. We considered creating a page with a bunch of thumbnails that you could enter multiple captions in at once, but we found that we really liked having a full, large view of the photo while we were captioning. Hmm …

Since Photosleeve pre-fetches the next photo, it’s not so much the page transition that makes captioning large batches of photos slow — it’s all the mouse clicking. So we added some keyboard shortcuts that let you edit photo captions quickly:

• Right- and Left-arrows flip through photos or pages
• c starts editing a caption
• Enter saves a caption

You can caption super fast by combining these keys and getting into a rhythm:

[c]  My first caption   [Enter]  [Right-arrow]
[c]  My second caption  [Enter]  [Right-arrow]
[c]  My third caption   [Enter]  [Right-arrow]
...

This example edits three photo captions in a row. The [c] starts editing the caption, [Enter] saves it, and then [Right-arrow] moves on to the next photo. It’s easy! Go give it a shot.

Derek & Ryan

P.S. Photosleeve Keyboard Shortcuts

If you’re using Internet Explorer (6 or 7), the dragbar can now hold up to 1000 photos. To try it out, just click on the “add all X pages” link in the bottom left of the dragbar (make sure that you’re looking at a group of photos with a lot of pages).

If you try to add more than 1000 photos, you’ll receive a message that the dragbar is full, like this:

For those interested in the details of how we changed things…

We first mentioned having to limit the capacity of the dragbar in Internet Explorer when we made some updates to Facebook publishing (Facebook Updates: Name Album, Increased Photo Limit).

Originally we kept track of the photos in the dragbar using cookies. As you dropped photos on the dragbar, we used javascript to modify the cookies. When it was time to reload the dragbar (ex. browsing to another page) we read the cookies and displayed the correct set of photos.

It turns out that even though the cookies were each below the maximum size, IE would not return the cookie contents once the total cookies were over a certain size.

So instead of storing the state in cookies, we took another approach. We moved the dragbar state to the server and now query it when necessary.

Enjoy the huge dragbar capacity (also in IE this time).

Derek & Ryan