Google has purchased Nik Software of the Snapseed app fame. This pits Google right up against Facebook’s Instagram, which is known for its photo editing and sharing features.
That said, Snapseed has always been a standalone photo editing application rather than a photo editing/sharing tool like Instagram, however it is pretty clear that Google plans on integrating some elements of Snapseed in Google+.
Vic Gundotra, who’s heading Google+ wrote in a blog post “We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone.”Apart from Snapseed, Nik software also makes Color Efex Pro for Windows and Dfine for Mac, but clearly Snapseed is its most popular product and even won the iOS iPad app of the year award in 2011. Versions of Snapseed are available for both Mac and iOS, and an Android version has been in the pipeline for quite a long time. In fact, during the Nvidia keynote at CES, the Android version of Snapseed was shown off on the Transformer Prime but we are yet to see it.
Besides jump-starting the Android version of Snapseed, Google has to be looking integrating it with Google+, which has already become a hotspot for photo enthusiasts as they can upload high-resolution images and crop and sharpen them with a suite of filters. The addition of features from Snapseed will really enhance the capabilities of Google+ as a social network for sharing photographs. In comparison, Facebook and Instagram are known to compress images to save server space, however off late Facebook has introduced high-resolution uploads. Yet the whole experience pales in comparison to Google+.
While Google+ is attracting photo enthusiasts, its mobile photo sharing community is meager in comparison to Facebook or Instagram and Google could improve it by adding features from Snapseed in its mobile apps.
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