Google acquires Nik Software

Google has announced that it has acquired Nik Software, a German software company behind the popular photo application Snapseed on Apple's iOS platform.

"We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone," said Google senior vice president Vic Gundotra in a post on Google's social networking service Google+.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, Xinhua reported Monday.

Nik Software offers photo editing tools for amateur and professional photographers. The $4.99 Snapseed won Apple's "iPad App of The Year" in 2011 and had over 9 million users during it first year on sale.

Nik Software also sells Snapseed for Mac and Windows computers and is working on an app for Google's Android platform.

Snapseed allows users to apply filters and perform other photo editing on their mobile devices and desktops.

It is the competitor to Instagram, which was purchased by Facebook in April for $1 billion.

As for the social networking competition between Facebook and Google, the search giant first rolled out some photo-friendly features, such as displaying pictures in a lightbox and allowing users to upload photos with large pixels.

But the photo community on Google+ and Snapseed does not have the popularity of Facebook or Instagram. According to Facebook, Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site online with over 250 million photos uploaded each day and Instagram now has more than 100 million users.

Google is expected to use Nik Software to develop photography apps for Google+, some analysts said.