We just can’t resist the extremely riveting acquisition news of late. First 3D Systems acquires Alibre. Now, the announcement of Autodesk acquiring flash-based, online photo editor Pixlr. They offer photo editing tools Pixlr Editor and Pixlr Express, screengrabbing tool Pixlr Grabber, a slick “post process” darkroom Pixlr-o-matic and one-click photo sharing with imm.io. I think you’d agree that it lines up with their cloud computing mobile efforts quite well, but there’s another editor in Autodesk’s arsenal which could see some Pixlr pounding action.
Pixlr is perhaps one of the better online photo-editors out there, right up with Google owned Picnik and Spark Capital’s Aviary, with Aviary having a richer toolset for web-based illustration and audio. (Whatever happened to Aviary’s 3D rendering engine Hummingbird??) Aviary would have actually been my guess at the photo editor Autodesk acquires. The interesting bit not mentioned in other coverage is how this lines up with Autodesk’s other photo editing software. Photo editing, or rather, photo manipulation is not new to Autodesk. Their Autodeesk Labs project Photofly, a Photo Scene Editor, allows you to create 3d models from photos taken from a camera. It’s cloud-based as well, files can be brought into AutoCAD, Inventor, 123D and it has all the typical sharing options. More editing and sharing options for the Photo Scene Editor or more 3D for Pixlr, could go either way, or both.
Update: A statement on Pixlr from Autodesk…
SketchBook Pro desktop users will now have the ability to read and write the PXD file format to easily exchange image files while maintaining deep data (like layers) and Pixlr users will be able to add more freehand sketching to their image projects. But, there are no plans to integrate Pixlr technologies beyond the SketchBook product line currently.
Release: Businesswire
