Playing with Picnik

On Eduserv Island
Originally uploaded by Art Fossett

Torley recently announced a short video tutorial showing how to use Picnik to take snapshots of Web pages. Over Twitter, I asked him how he moved SL snapshots into Flickr and he replied saying that he used SLBuzz, which can receive images direct from SL using email and which has an option to forward on any images to your Flickr account.

I joined SLBuzz a while ago but then forgot about it. I just tried again, and getting snapshots from SL into it seems very straightforward. I haven't got the syncing with Flickr to work yet - not sure why? But it doesn't matter too much because I've also installed the Firefox Picnik add-on which allows me to right-click on the image in SLBuzz and take it directly into Picnik.

Once there, I can edit it as I see fit, then save direct to my Art Fossett Flickr account.

From Flickr, I can blog the image directly into here, via my Blogger account.

Everything happens without touching my laptop disk drive and without having to run Gimp. Don't get me wrong... I like Gimp and use it all the while. But the, save to disk, load into Gimp, save to disk, upload to blog routine was getting pretty tedious.

I'll try the new process for a while and see how I get on. It's not perfect, but I think it's better than what I was doing before.

Second Friends profile images

One of the original design features of Second Friends was that it would re-use people's in-world profile image as the image displayed on their Facebook profile and in their friends' 'My friends' list. The idea was that as little as possible of the Second Life profile information should be replicated in Facebook.

Linden Lab serves your in-world profile image on the Web at a URL of the form:

http://secondlife.com/services/user/small_image/...jpg

and I currently display this in the Second Friends part of people's Facebook profile.

Unfortunately, the images are served in the wrong aspect ratio and in a form that is not cachable by the browser. To make things worse, there is often a significant delay in the way they are served. I don't know if LL do this to discourage their use in external applications such as Second Friends but whatever the reasoning or rationale, the bottom line is that using them is unreliable.

I've therefore added a feature that allows people to add a URL of an image of their avatar to their Second Friends preferences. Go to the My preferences tab to make use of this. It's up to people to find themselves a place to host the image, but Flickr is an obvious choice.