Pixenate is a white-label online photo editor which is designed to be integrated into any existing social network or photo sharing/printing website. It works on Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera browsers and allows you to do some reasonably sophisticated online photo editing. It also comes in a Spanish version.
It’s pretty simple. Upload a photo, edit it then save it to your desktop or post to Flickr. I found that cropping and manipulating an image was a cinch and it automatically posted the image to my Fickr stream when I allowed it to hook into my account via Flickr’s API. I have a desktop app on my Mac that is quite capable of taking longer, given that it has to boot up, and then sending something to Flickr is a separate operation again.
Pixenate’s Ireland-based owner Sxoop Technologies is a one-man bootstrapped operation by founder Walter Higgins, but despite its humble start it has picked up some plaudits from clients including Where, Kadoo, Filmkluis, and MyPhotoAlbum among others. And the site demoed at Under The Radar in Silicon Valley in June 2006 in competition with funded companies like FilmLoop. Interestingly FilmLoop was a much better funded online imaging editor which raised $11.5 million in capital, but it closed early last year after problems with investors, which makes the boostrapped Pixenate look a little smarter.
I liked Pixenate and may well use it professionally when I just need a quick Web app for photos. One criticism though, and it’s got nothing to do with the app itself. The cheesy testimonial quotes ticking over at the top of the page were rather distracting when editing the image.