Online photo editor Aviary hopes to take Picnik’s place

Sad that Google’s online photo editor Picnik is meeting its demise this year? Well, veteran photo editing service Aviary is plotting to take its place. On Monday the company announced it’s bringing its photo editing services to the Web with a new Facebook app.

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“We took the best pieces of our original software, made it lightweight, and launched into Facebook. We were founded to try to bring creativity to the masses,” Alexander Taub, Aviary’s lead of business development and partnerships, told VentureBeat.

Aviary started out in 2007 as a powerful editing service for professionals — “Photoshop in the cloud” as Taub  calls it. In 2011, the company moved into the mobile device market with a mobile API.

Aviary lets you do all the basic photo edits you’d expect; crop, brightness, and contrast. Beyond simple edits, Aviary has several photo filters and stickers to add personality to your pictures. The filters give your photos the in-demand retro Instagram-look, a feature Picnik lacked.

With Picnik gone, Aviary hopes to be the better and more powerful answer to Picnik, with more tools and faster photo editing. It also hopes to offer its services on a larger online scale.

“Picnik built their offering into third party apps such as Flickr. We want to fill the gap Picnik has created with those services,” said Taub.

Aviary is based in New York City and has raised a total of $11M from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and Spark Capital.