Google on Monday announced the acquisition of Nik Software, a photo application maker similar to the Instagram application purchased by Facebook in April.
"We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone," Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said in a post of Google's social networking service Google+.
Nik Software, a 17-year-old firm, is the company behind the photo sharing app Snapseed on Apple's iOS platform. A strong competitor to Instagram, Snapseed allows users to edit and filter photographs on smarphones. In 2011, Snapseed was titled as "iPad App of The Year" and received over nine million users in its first year itself. Google+ has over 400 million users and has crossed 100 million monthly active users, said Gundotra, according to Reuters.
"For nearly 17 years, we've been guided by our motto, 'photography first,' as we worked to build world class digital image editing tools," Germany-based Nik said in a blog post.
"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," the company said.
Google has not declared the financial terms of the deal.
Although Google+ is witnessing a remarkable growth day by day, Google+ has not crossed Facebook records, the social networking company said. Facebook claims that it is the largest photo sharing social networking site having more than 250 million photos every day.
