Picnik Closing Its Site and Moving to Google+

Image via Wikipedia

If you're a Picnik user, you received an email earlier this morning informing you they are officially closing down their website:

Official Announcement: Picnik is closing

Since joining Google in 2010, we have been creating editing magic in Google products while continuing to keep Picnik awesome. But now we get to focus on even awesomer things. Picnik will be closing on April 19, 2012.

Your photos liberated
Amazing photos are created in Picnik, so we have launched a new feature, Picnik Takeout, that easily downloads your photos to your desktop in convenient zip files. You may also elect to copy your photos to Google+ where you can store and share your creations. You may request your photos at any time and use this handy tool as many times as you like until our closing date of April 19, 2012. Learn more.

Premium Refunds
To our primo Picnik Premium members, we'll begin processing a full refund of your current membership fee within a week of this announcement. By "in full" we mean the whole darn thing. Yep, this means even if you are on your very last day of an annual membership, we will refund you the entire $24.95. Just because we want to say thanks.

Now the Good News - Free Premium for ALL!
To express our gratitude for your support over the past 5 years, Picnik Premium is free for everyone! Use Picnik in all of its premium glory, for free, from now until our actual closing day. Touch-up, Textures, Advanced, and more are all free for you to use!

We have been incredibly proud of building a product that is used and beloved by so many of you. We continue to be amazed and humbled by the photos you create and we are immensely grateful for all of your support, creativity, and passion.

We are excited by the photo-editing fun we have already brought to Google products, like Google+, where you can find many of your favorite Picnik effects in Creative Kit. We encourage you to visit Google+ and give it a whirl. Please visit the Help Hub for more information on our wind down, and check the Picnik blog for updated information on our April closure.

It's been awesome,
Team Picnik

As you can see, they've really thought about their customers. All paying ones get a full refund and Picnik is now entirely free until April 19, 2012! So if there have been some photos you were wanting to edit, but were contemplating paying for Picnik, now is your chance to get all the premium features for free!

Also, if you're a Google+ user you will still be able to use these awesome online tools! If not... maybe you should become one as free image editing tools only is the tip of the iceberg of awesome features in Google+.

Think about that for a second though. Facebook is probably the largest photo sharing website and they never thought to incorporate photo editing software into their site! Google is on to something... with Hangouts and now Picnik features, they'll continue to grow and will be a pretty tough competitor for Facebook in the future.