This might be the coolest way to browse photos on Flickr. Tag Galaxy is a 3D Flex application that allows visitors to browse Flickr by entering a starting tag. Once you enter a tag, you see the tag as a 3D planet-like object, with other related tags circulating the main object. Once you select a tag to explore further, clicking on it brings photos onto the 3D object and displays them for users to browse. You can spin the globe around to browse the photos. Its a bit hard to explain, so head over to the site and explore it yourself.

The integration of Flickr and Picknik is now live on Flickr's website - users can now use Picknik, a Flex based photo editing application, to edit photos that they've uploaded to Flickr. Photos that you've uploaded in Flickr should now have an "Edit Photo" link above them, which launches Picnik application right in the page. Picnik has added at least one feature that I hadn't noticed before: full screen editing. Under the Picnik menu you can select Full Screen and launch the editor in full screen, without any browser controls.

From a business standpoint, Picnik hopes to make money off their Picnik Premium subscription that is available. For $24.95 per year, users get access to advanced controls in the Picnik editor. The Picnik team deserves a lot of credit for the way they've implemented those features in Picnik. They're all available in the editor, and you can see what the changes will do to your photos when you use them, but to actually apply those changes you'll have to dish out the $24.95. Nice touch - much better than having me guess at what I'm buying. I'm sure more than a few Flickr users will dish out the $2 / month for those features, which should make the deal a success for Picknik and Flickr (who now have some happier users).

TechCrunch, News.com and Ryan Stewart have more information.

Picnik is an online photo editor, similar to iPhoto, that allows you to do simple edits to photos from the your computer, your webcam, or the Internet. It is similar to Fauxto in that it allows you edit photos online, but the functions are more like iPhoto than Photoshop. For instance, unlike Fauxto, there's no concept of layers. However, it does do what most of us want to do with photos: autofix, rotate, crop, change the exposure, change the colors, sharpen and remove red eye from photos.

Unlike any other online photo editors that I've seen, there are a number of ways to get photos up to Picnik. You can upload a photo from your computer, like any other service, but you can also get photos from Flickr, Yahoo Image Search, a website or your webcam. Because the site is built with Flash, it can access your webcam directly, and you can easily take a photo of yourself and edit it in just a few seconds. That's pretty cool.

You can save the photos back to Flickr, your computer or your website. If you've got your website setup properly, you can actually email the photo back to the website, similar to what you could do with emailing photos from a cell phone.

This looks like an application to keep an eye on. The front end is done with Flex, and it appears that the backend is done using Python. This is also covered over on Mashable.