14 DAY TRIAL // Another week another acquisition, that seems to be the Google mantra. To kick things off to a good start this week, Google has announced it has purchased Picnik, an online photo editor that integrates with several photo-sharing services including Picasa and Flickr. No financial details have been released. There are no changes planned for Picnik for now, but a tighter integration with Picasa is likely.
"Today, we're excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser," Brian Axe, product management director at Google, wrote.
"We're not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we'll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we'd like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks," he added.
Both Google and Picnik claim that there won't be any changes to the site for now and, more importantly, that it will be available with all its current partners, but they're not making any guarantees. This is a big issue for Yahoo's Flickr, where Picnik is the main editing app and the two services are pretty well integrated. The Picnik editor is also available in Yahoo Mail. With the company in the hands of its rival, Yahoo doesn't really have any short-term options and is more or less at the mercy of Google.
For Google, the acquisition makes a lot of sense. Picasa is one of its few web services that rely heavily on a desktop application to handle the management, editing and bulk uploading. With the Picnik app, users can do basic editing online, so there's less need for the desktop app. Considering that Google's upcoming Chrome OS won't have any other native application than the web browser, there was a clear need for better web tools for Picasa.
Google has been known to buy companies and let them wither, it has been known to integrate them completely with the Google lineup and it has been known to help them thrive while remaining relatively independent. The first path seems unlikely in this case, but the jury is out on the other two.