Editing your Mobile Photos through Flickr & Aviary // An Introduction

I predominately use flickr to host my photos for the blog, newsletter, & other online sorts of things.  I've had a pro account for like 4 years.....I think it's the longest relationship I've been in!  When picnik was still around, I loved the ability to edit photos in picnik & save them directly to my flickr photo stream.  It was easier that way & I could access my photos wherever I was writing a blog post.

Since picnik has gone by the wayside, I've been using PicMonkey for my on the fly photo editing & small projects.  However, PicMonkey only allows you to save to your computer. Sometimes (well, all the time) I'm too lazy to plug in my phone to my computer & download the photos to edit.  To solve this I found some awesome iphone apps to adjust the photos taken by my phone.  I'd edit the photos, save them to my camera roll, then upload them through the flickr app, & stick them in a blog post.  It's not that much of a hassle but I feel I'm gaining bad posture hunched over the tiny screen on my phone.  Imagine my surprise when I checked Flickr to see if I could edit photos straight from the site & found that Aviary has replaced the edit in picnik option.

I love that this alternate to downloading my iPhone photos exists.  It cuts out the the upload them again step because I'm too lazy to plug in my phone.  Usually I would upload to flickr, locate & download the image, edit, then upload either to flickr or to the blog. It also saves harddrive space since I don't really need all those random pictures taking up space.

Simple Edits with Aviary:

Crop your photos to edit out any background that may be distracting.  You can see these photos were from the yummy Baked Salmon recipe posted this week.  Did you know all those pictures were taking with my phone?  Some of the background-ness featuring our kitchen counter, paper towels, & spices needed to be cropped out of the picture which I did through Aviary.

There is also an auto enhance with a few different options if you're looking to make a good picture slightly better or they need just a little adjusting.

Taking it further you have control over specific enhancements & edits like sharpness.  Simply click the diamond icon to be taken to the sharpness tool.  Drag the white dot left or right until you are satisfies.  Don't forget to hit apply to save your edits.

Applying Filters, Text, Stickers, & Fixes

There are also several different filters you can apply to your photos to get desired effects such as soft focus, black & white, or sepia.  You can also apply different colored filters for fun.

 Apply text in different colors & fonts by selecting the Aa icon.  Choose fonts from the drop down menu & colors from the slider.  Set text border colors as well.  If you click the rainbow option on the left hand side you can drag to set a custom color however you can not input hex codes for accuracy.

Other options include Blemish Fix, Whiten, Draw, & Stickers.  Make sure you click apply to save your changes.

Saving Your Image to Your Photo Stream:

When you have finished applying all the edits you wish, select SAVE. You'll be directed to a dialog box to name & describe your photo.  Additionally, you can save a new copy or replace the existing copy.  Unless I've added overlays or text, I usually replace the old photo.  You may want to create a new copy of the photo is you've added text or any other filters, etc so you will have the original copy available to you.  Select save changes.

Once you've finished you're directed back to your photo stream where you can find & share your image.

This editing with in the site feature has helped me out so much since I discovered it!  Happy editing!

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