Polishing the Chrome

Making your users' experience shine

Picnik is all about providing a fun, convenient way to make your photos look their best — no matter where they are. To make sure that your users have the best possible Picnik experience, we offer a few tools to customize the Picnik interface to suit your needs.

Modifying The Export Text

There are two parameters you can use to change the text for exporting.

The first of these is the _export_title parameter. This controls the text that is displayed on the bright yellow "Export" button. The default text is, of course, "Export". You can specify any text for this that you like (for example, "Save To MyAwesomePhotoSite"), but keep the text under 32 characters long.

The other parameter is _host_name. For this, pass in the human-readable name of your application (for example, "MyAwesomePhotoSite"). Picnik will then use this value in its UI when the opportunity arises. Currently, only one such opportunity exists: instead of seeing an "Exporting..." dialog while the image is being rendered, users will see, for example, "Exporting to MyAwesomePhotoSite...". Again, this should be no more than 32 characters long.

Turning Off Tabs

If you're creating an application which focuses on saving images to your website, it doesn't make sense to confuse users with the "Save & Share" tab. Similarly, if your application is already providing specific images for editing then you might not want the "Photos" tab to show up. To control the presence of these tabs, use the _exclude parameter.

Be careful about using this parameter as a sledgehammer when all you need are a few tweaks. It's a very rare application that needs to suppress more than one tab.

Adding A Close Button

If you've created an app which uses the export button, you probably also want to add the _close_target parameter to your Picnik call. This parameter adds a close button to the top of the Picnik UI, giving your users an obvious way to "cancel" the export and return to your application.

Next Steps

Take your UX to the next level by floating Picnik right over your website. And of course, you can always go back and take a look at all the tutorials.