In the "huge step forward in the evolution of digital photography online" Flickr has just announced a partnership with online photo editing service Picnik.

Picnik’s awesome photo editing tools are now only a click away. If you’ve ever wanted to deal with the dreaded red eye or crop a photo just so, click on the new “edit photo” icon located above one of your photos and get started.

Picnik has been providing online photo editing for a while now. As soon as we saw it, we knew that there was huge potential for us to join together. Rather than Flickr diverting from our speciality to enter a realm we had no (particular) expertise in, the thought of a partnership seemed much more sensible.

The Picnik/Flickr collaboration works similarly to other 3rd party services who’ve built additional tools on top of the Flickr API: You’ll need to pass through the step of giving the Picnik service permission to edit and save your photos… It’s a little bit like you’re “installing” Picnik on your Flickr account, but with nothing to download.