Just In, Google Has Acquired Nik Software!

This news just popped up on Facebook!

Here's a quote someone posted from Nik:

"We are pleased to announce that Google has acquired Nik Software. For nearly 17 years, we’ve been guided by our motto, “photography first”, as we worked to build world class digital image editing tools. We’ve always aspired to share our passion for photography with everyone, and with Google’s support we hope to be able to help many millions more people create awesome pictures.
We’re incredibly grateful for all of your support and hope you’ll join us on the next phase of our journey as part of Google.

All our best!

The Nik Software Team"

Just in?

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1229110

Ah, well, I can be behind on "breaking news"...!

That's just odd. Why in the world would they do that? They could have just licensed the algorithms if they wanted to include them in Picasa. They bought Picnik and closed it down and as far as I knew, it was pretty popular and making money. What in the world do they have up their sleeve? Are these two things related? Picasa getting a major overhaul?

RIP Nik Software. Sucks, a lot of good software is going to die because of this.

kfreels wrote in post #15043587
That's just odd. Why in the world would they do that? They could have just licensed the algorithms if they wanted to include them in Picasa. They bought Picnik and closed it down and as far as I knew, it was pretty popular and making money. What in the world do they have up their sleeve? Are these two things related? Picasa getting a major overhaul?

The thinking is that they want Snapseed in order to compete with Instagram. Instead of some protracted contract or licensing arrangement, they probably just figured that buying it outright would be more cost effective in the long run. Who knows, they've got piles of cash and nothing to spend it on?

elrey2375 wrote in post #15043979
The thinking is that they want Snapseed in order to compete with Instagram. Instead of some protracted contract or licensing arrangement, they probably just figured that buying it outright would be more cost effective in the long run. Who knows, they've got piles of cash and nothing to spend it on?

That explains it. I never heard of snapseed until I just now looked it up. Didn't realize they had an online editing portal. Of course they bought picnik too which I thought was supposed to fulfill that role. The problem is that rather than having a dedicated site for editing, they integrated it into google+ and you get the images from picasa web albums. The whole thnigs is a typical Google user interface blunder. My daughter was a dedicated picnik user ad she has a google plus account but she never knew that she could get to editing tools through google plus until stumbled across it last night while poking around.

I've glanced at Picasa, but never actually used it, since I shoot Raw and have been using Lightroom and occasionally Photoshop for my "developing".

I wonder if Google will use Nik for Picasa "plug-ins"? And include it for free? That would be interesting!

Hopefully it'll be free...

I can understand them wanting Snapseed but I sure hope they let Nik operate as a stand alone operation so that we continue to get the kind of plugins and future development that we like. So many times big companies will buy the smaller operation for one thing that they like about them and then let everything else die a slow death.

I finally bought the Lightroom collection after finally using the demo. I've used them before, but never enough to buy the pack. No I have reason since I do much more shooting this year, than the first 3 years put together.

Hopefully get snapseed on android now & they keep the rest of the lr/ps plugins as awesome.