You Can Now Edit Your Friends' Picasa Photos with Picnik

Google is making Picasa Web Albums more social with the introduction of collaborative editing. Ever since the acquisition of Picnik, Picasa users have been able to edit their photos online using the Picnik editor. Now, Google is expanding this support to collaborative albums, enabling all contributors to edit any image and create new copies.

"Picasa Web Albums has expanded the collaborative albums feature to support collaborative editing using Picnik. Now you can invite friends and family to contribute to an album either by uploading photos of their own or by editing any existing photos in that album," Thomas Kang, Software Engineer at Google, writes.

Picasa introduced collaborative albums in 2009. The idea was to enable multiple users to add their photos to the same album, for example if they were from the same event.

The feature makes it a lot easier to have a single place to share related images. Now, with Picnik support, more users can also start editing the photos on their own, regardless who owns the original image.

"Your original always stays safe and sound as your collaborators make edits to add funny speech bubbles, give you pointers on editing techniques, or pitch in to help you touch up your hundreds of vacation photos," Kang explained.

"If they edit one of your photos in Picnik and save the changes, it will save back to your album as a new image, and their name will show in the sidebar to give them credit for the new version," he added.

There's no need to enable collaborative editing with Picnik specifically, the feature is automatically enabled if you select the "Let people I share with contribute photos" option when sharing an album.

Collaborative editing comes in very handy in a number of cases and could prove a lot of fun. As Google continues to make its products more social, perhaps it's small steps and features like this that help the most rather than huge product launches.