Google grabs picture-editing site Picnik

Online photo-editing website Picnik has been bought by Google. This fills a gap in Google’s Picasa service which already allows users to organise and edit pictures on their computers and display them in web albums. What has been missing is the ability to edit photographs online.

The services offered by Picnik are similar to cut-down versions of editing programs such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. The difference is that because Picnik is online and accessed through a web browser it doesn’t need a powerful computer to work.

This is important to Google which is developing its own operating system called “Chrome” that is designed to run on small, lightweight, low-powered netbook computers. A picture editor will be a useful addition.

Some questions about the acquisition remain unanswered. It’s not clear whether Picnik will retain its present pricing structure which offers additional functionality to paying subscribers. Google tends to offer services free to all but large organisations. Also, Picnik is very tightly integrated with the Flickr photo-sharing service owned by Google’s rival Yahoo so it remains to be seen if those ties are loosened over time.

Incidentally, Picnik is far from being the only online photo-editing service. FotoFlexer, for instance, has more free features even if it’s marginally harder to use and feels a little slower than Picnik.

There’s an online version of Photoshop which can’t compete with the paid-for packages of the same name. But it’s adequate for quickly tidying up snaps.

More powerful is Splashup although some find it a little hard to use. For creativity, Aviary offers a growing suite of free graphics and audio-editing software to use online.

Windows or Mac OSX users can download Gimp which is free but offers many of the same functions as Photoshop which costs almost £1000 (yes, one thousand pounds). And, for anybody looking for an easy-to-use improvement on the software which came with their camera, Paint.NET is well worth investigating and it’s free.

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