Google announced today that it has acquired Picnik, a company that provides a fully-featured Web-based photo editing application. This is the latest in a recent string of acquisitions that has also seen Google snap up the social search site Aardvark.

Picnik is a flash-based photo editor capable of real-time cropping, resizing, rotating, special effects, and other manipulations. It can pull photos from websites including Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace, or from a user's computer. The basic service is free, but the site offers a more sophisticated service for about $25 a year.

Google most likely wants to beef up its online photo-sharing service, Picasa, which currently has fairly minimal photo editing capabilities. It says it's not changing Picnik yet, but will be working on "integration and new features."

Other online photo editors include Photoshop.com, Aviary, and FotoFlexer.

Adobe plans to launch a free online photo-editing service called Photo Express. Although the company has not yet set a release date, Adobe senior vice president John Loiacono gave a brief demo of the product during his recent keynote at Photoshop World Las Vegas 2007. "The intent here is to make it very simplistic," Loiacono told the audience, explaining that the product is intended for the mass market rather than for graphics professionals. Photo Express can crop images, perform white balances, and apply other basic tools. Entirely browser based, it runs on Flash, which is a common method of delivering applications over the Internet. (See "Computer in the Cloud.")

Photo Express should be useful for bloggers and other people with basic but regular photo-editing needs. It looks as though it will provide more editing power than Google's Picasa, but with a similarly basic interface.

Adobe's move into free online services is interesting to watch. Earlier this year, Adobe launched Premiere Express, a free online basic video-editing service.