Google buys Picnik photo-editing site

BEIJING, March 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Google has bought Picnik, an online utility that allows users to edit digital photographs online. It is that latest in a series of web-based tools the search giant has purchased adding to its growing portfolio of acquisitions.

In a blog post Google product management director Brian Axe said, "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."

"Until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer," Axe said, "Today, we're excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud."

Picnik was launched in 2005 and has 20 employees. It offers free and premium photo-editing services. The free plan has a basic toolkit providing cropping, color-correction, auto-fix, and is paid for with advertising. The premium service, which starts at around 2 U.S. dollars per month, is ad-free and provides more image-manipulation tools.

Picnik works with a variety of other web services, including Google's competitors. Yahoo Mail users, for example, may use Picnik to edit photos inside Yahoo Mail. Picnik also provides similar integration with other popular social-networking and image-storing sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Photobucket.

Following the Google merger, Picnik accounts and settings will stay the same. Users will not need a Google account, or even have to register, to use the photo-editing service, according to Picnik officials.

Google's purchase of Picnik comes three weeks after the Internet giant bought Aardvark, a "social search" service that relies on a user's contacts to provide answers to questions. Google also wants to buy AdMob, a mobile advertising service, for 750 million U.S. dollars. However, that deal is still being reviewed by antitrust regulators. In a conference call with analysts in January

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said the company planned to acquire about one company a month this year. In 2009 Google made only five major purchases, On2, a video codec technology company, reCAPTCHA a company specializing in optical character recognition, the VOIP client Gizmo5, the online advertising company Teracent and the collaborative realtime editor AppJet. Some of these deals were only finalized in 2010 however.