We last caught up with Pics.io back in the summer, when it was just starting out in beta form. Now the service has gone live, and you can convert and edit your RAW photos right there in the browser. Yes, the future really has arrived.
To use Pics.io you need to upload your photos to Google Drive (it works a lot like Dropbox). From there, the photo will be converted to JPG so that the browser can actually display it, whereupon you can make basic edits: crop, B&W conversions, sepia, brightness and contrast and image rotation.
As a technological demo, Pics.io is a marvel. Who’d have thought we’d be editing huge RAW files in the browser in 2013? But as a practical service it seems less useful. Why upload and edit when you can just edit a converted RAW file right there on an iPhone?
I can see that it might be useful for client work, though, letting you dump a whole shoot into Google Drive and letting somebody else take a peek at the unedited files. Then again, even with a 10/100 meg fiber connection it’s probably still faster to make a quick batch JPG conversion locally and upload those.
Whatever, the service is dead impressive for an alpha and might save your bacon one day. And support for other cloud services is coming soon so you won’t be stuck with the Evil Empire.
Source: Pics.io
Thanks: Konstantin!
