Mountain View, California — Keeping up on its promise to pursue small acquisitions — Search engine giant Google on Monday announced that it has just added Picnik.com, a Web-based application that empower users to import, edit and store photos online to its arsenal.
Web-based photo editing application Picnik announced today that it has been acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount that Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato called a “very, very happy figure.”
According to a blog post on the company’s Web site, Picnik started out as an online service that empowers users to edit digital photos directly in their browsers without having to download software.
“Until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer,” Brian Axe, a Google product management director, said in an official blog on Monday.
“Today, we are excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud, though we will be working hard on integration and new features,” wrote Axe.
Picnik via flickr.com
Picnik is one of the first sites to offer photo editing to the cloud, Google said, allowing users to crop, add effects, or do touch-ups from the browser. Picnik serves nearly 2 million unique users a month and offers a free service and a paid version that costs $25 a year.
According to its Web site, Picnik is fully integrated with other popular photo-management and sharing services like Google’s Picasa Web Albums, Yahoo’s Flickr, Photobucket and the photo album components from Facebook, MySpace, SmugMug, Box.net, Lexmark, and Webshots. It also has plug-ins for Firefox, Internet Explorer, WordPress, Moveable Type, and Yahoo. Google intends to preserve and nurture those partnerships, according to Axe.
“We are looking forward to working closely with [Picnik] to improve the online photo editing experience on the web,” Axe concluded. “In the meantime, we encourage you to head to Picnik, import some of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr or Facebook and try your hand at photo editing in the cloud.”
With access to Google’s vast technical resources will result in faster and better enhancements to the Picnik service, Picnik said in a separate blog post.
“Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we will reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome,” reads the blog post.
Picnik, established in 2006, was privately held and has about 20 employees. It will remain in Seattle but move to Google’s offices in that city. Picnik’s site attracts almost 40 million visits per month, with each visit lasting an average of 17 minutes, according to the company’s Web site.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
This is not the first company that Picnik’s chief executive, Sposato, has sold to Google. His first sale was a product called Phatbits that became part of the Google Gadgets platform.
Google’s acquisition of Picnik comes about 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 chief executive Eric Schmidt, in a conference call with reporters in January, asserted that the Mountain View, California, company intends to purchase about one company a month this year.