Picnik Picnik

Picnik is also the only editor here that lets you print photos. And even though it's the easiest to use, it also has the best help: Brief explanations of features pop up as you need them.

As I was working on this review, I was able to try out a prerelease version of a new feature, called Picnik Baskets, that works something like FotoFlexer's layers. While not as powerful as Photoshop layers, Picnik Baskets lets you drag and stack up to five images from a nifty pop-up viewer into an editing window, where you can apply different effects to each to create a photo collage.

Those images must come from your PC or another site: Unlike the other services here, Picnik doesn't store any photos. Fortunately, however, its support for third-party photo sites is as seamless and comprehensive as that of any other contender I tried.

The one feature Picnik denies freeloading users that I really missed is a full-screen editing mode; the service displays banner advertising, which reduces the size of the editing window. (Every other service in my roundup except Picture2Life allows full-screen editing.)

The Premium version has no ads, however; its other benefits include stylish additional fonts and Photoshop-like manual editing of image levels and curves. Premium also lifts the five-image limit on Picnik Basket documents, and lets you track back through any image you ever edited and undo any change. For heavy users, I think Premium is worth the annual $25 fee--but Picnik's service is pretty darn likable even if you don't pay a cent.