Keeping with the proposed ongoing expansion drive for the year 2010, the search industry behemoth, Google Inc. has now acquired one of the most widely used online image editing tools, Picnik, for an undisclosed amount and has so far withheld the terms of the acquisition. Picnik has long been admired for its simplicity and the various functions that are provided by the service for the users to edit their images and then upload them on various social networking services, without ever having to download any software and of course, the service has always been a free of cost.

For the users who had always wished for an online imaging service, that could be equivalent to the extremely pricey, Adobe Photoshop, Picnik also runs a paid service, that consists of the a one time annual fee of $25, providing the users with advanced image editing features, the likes of which are found in Photoshop. Jonathan Sposato, the CEO of Picnik has a long standing relationship with Google, as he had previously sold yet another of his verticals, called, Phatbits, that was absorbed by the Google Gadgets service. With the sale of Picnik, Mr. Sposato and his employees will now be joining the Google team and work from the search giant’s Seattle offices.

According to Google,

“More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we’re excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud.”

However, there is intense speculation as to the longevity of Picnik on social networking services such as Facebook, Flickr, Photoworks etc. as the service is provided via Picasa, that was acquired by Google in the year 2004. The acquisition of Picnik by Google has raised doubts, about the service’s continued operations with social networking services.

Via New York Times