Just about everyone loves Google, including us. About two years ago, we built a way for Pixlr Editor and Pixlr Express users to hook up our apps to Gmail and Google Drive, making it a breeze to open, edit, and save your images. Unfortunately, we had an issue recently with these connections that were failing for users (thank you for the reports!), but we’re happy to report that both Google Drive and Gmail integrations are back up and running. If you hooked up our apps to Google Drive and Gmail, you don’t need to do anything special. Your old connection will work just fine. You can get back to editing and saving your images in the same way you always have.
Never tried this before? It’s easy to set up.
If you’ve never taken advantage of this option, we thought this would be a great time to show you how to do it and what it looks like. If you’re a dedicated Google user, this will save you some serious clicks — especially if you use Google Drive as a repository or backup for all of your photos.
When you receive an email with attachments, clicking on the image preview in the Gmail interface expands the preview into an overlay with a black background. You’ll see an “Open with” drop-down menu. Clicking on that will offer up some suggested apps from Google. If you see ours as an option, you can simply click on it to open your image in either Pixlr Editor or Pixlr Express.
If you don’t see that option automatically presented, it’s easy to add us. Click on “Connect more apps” and search for “pixlr” and you can connect one or both of the apps.
From then on, you can open up images in our apps from both Gmail and Google Drive at will. The real beauty of this integration is in its ability to save back your images to Google Drive. For example, we opened up this image we took while on an early morning jog in Golden Gate Park and made a quick edit in Pixlr Editor. When we save, we’re shown the usual Pixlr Library options, but now you’ll notice that Google Drive is shown as your save location. You can either save over your image or save a copy if you want to add a little bit of version control.
As you can see, it’s pretty easy to set up and offers a quick, no-hassle way to edit photos on the fly that you receive as attachments or deposit in your Google Drive. Here’s hoping the time you save will be better spent making your photos look that much better.