Google Nik collection now available for free | Hacker News Reader

Google Nik collection now available for free

google.com

217 pointsNumberwang50 comments

This is a real bummer because it implies they are done developing it.

I bought the Nik Collection a couple years ago and I have gotten good value out of the product. I hoped they would continue to improve it.

If you like photography should should definitely download it.

I always thought it was a slightly odd acquisition for Google. Didn't seem like it would really fit with Photos use case, and I suspect, sadly, that you are right.

Couldn't they add it to Picasa?

Picasa is dead, Google Photos is the primary photo product

Such a travesty. Someday we will look back and see the whole web application trend as a technological plague that wiped out great native desktop applications replacing them with inferior web versions that nobody actually wanted.

Google Photos is amazing, superior, and everything I've wanted for years. Seriously.

I don't hate it, but a big problem for me is that the editing seems to produce quite low-quality output, at least in the Android app (maybe it's better if you use the web version?). For the use-case of cropping/editing photos and sharing low-res versions on Twitter it's not very noticeable, but I was very surprised when I looked at one of my edited photos in higher res and it had a bunch of really grating artifacts, that weren't in either the original, or a similar edit reproduced in gimp.

You obviously haven't tried to paginate quickly browsing through thousands of photos.

I couldn't disagree with you more, Google Photos is garbage compared to Picasa. There's no folders and no tags (for writing a quick description that applies to a bunch of pictures), no manual face tagging (for when the magic fails, or tagging pets, or tagging people that were there but not in the photo, or just tagging things that aren't faces), no people pane (where you can select two or more people to quickly see all the photos of them together), no batch editing of any kind really, no bulk mechanism to give your feedback to the facial recognition engine to help it learn (did Google Photos perfect that technology? Is that why it doesn't need our help anymore? No. It just misses half the faces Picasa would've caught)

In lieu of these basic requirements, Photos presumes to be able to create collages automatically for me (sure put all those pictures that are basically identical together) and albums (oh yes call that one "Trip to California" it's not like I don't fucking live in California). Not to mention all of this is happening in a browser that is clearly sweating to scroll hundreds of thumbnails across my screen where Picasa would effortlessly zoom and resize on the fly.

I honestly don't see how Photos could ever deliver a superior user experience to Picasa without first abandoning the idea that it's all going to happen in a browser. I'm also curious what your use-case is that Photos is actually superior to Picasa in your opinion, are you a heavy user?

This is how Google Photos fits into my overall workflow. I absolutely love it but it's not the most important or critical piece.

https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin...

Manual face tagging is there now, and it definitely looks like they're trying to bring as many (relevant to web) Picasa features as possible to Google Photos.

Google Photos is 'partially' superior because of its super-search, which was not there in Picasa. People, place, things or time (and their combinations), it can search them all without any manual tagging required. Picasa Desktop or web couldn't search photos of "Alice and Bob riding hiking/riding a boat" by just typing that in. Sure, they could have built that feature to the desktop app as well, that would have been the best.

As there seem to be done Photos fans here; I've tried to ensure that all my hundreds of photos are in albums (they've settled on the term album now, right?) but there doesn't seem to be any way to check. I'd like to look at the set of photos not in any album so that I can either move it into an album or delete it. What do I do?

Picasa has a click-and-type description at each folder where you can write something like "Burning Man 2015" which becomes globally searchable (along with your people, place, etc. tags). I suppose an AI could determine that my photos are from Burning Man 2015 by inspecting the Exif tags and doing some Freebase magic but there's a whole semantic chasm between that and "Lorelei's first Burning Man".

Auto enrichment of my tags and descriptions would actually be a nice feature but that assumes some basic usable tags and descriptions first. It seems like the designers are too busy coming up with futuristic magic to think about good old practical usability. Worse they also seem completely out of touch with what's practically achievable so their futuristic magic ends up being useless.

I'm sure the usage of the Picasa desktop app wasn't very high, and the Photos web version captures most of the features users wanted like albums, editing, tagging and sharing (lacking folders still).

Nothing wrong with Google thinking that Picasa usage didn't justify continued development. Other companies are free to make a great native desktop app for photos as their core product, but Google is surely thrilled with the reception of Photos.

Right now I see it as a technological boon that ensures that I have access to software irrespective of my OS platform. That used to matter so much previously. Now it doesn't, and that's great.

> that ensures that I have access to software

...until they shut off the server that serves you that software, or remove/change features you liked. In the old days, you could save your software somewhere and know you could always use it and it wouldn't change on you.

By that logic, it is perfectly fine that Google stopped developing Picasa, since the executables are still available somewhere

no- you are comparing apple to oranges (use some other figure of speech- I'm no native speaker)

yes, it is perfectly ok, that Google discontinued Picasa- I am still using my Installation

no, as I would have liked some improvements to it...

I wasn't taking a position on that, but I realize the sub-thread was about Picasa. Yes, it is better if a desktop app without cloud dependencies is abandoned, than a webapp.

The only problem with webapps is they they are fragile and depend on a set of materials. If we had a way, we could make a completely contained webapp, call it a dApp...

Oh wait, we now do: IPFS can do the storage mechanism and contain the whole app as a link and just work. And with that magic, it will never 'link rot' as everything would be self-contained. Yep, that's a solution.

I think the whole team was used to build out the Google Plus (now Google Photos) product (which has pretty awesome/fun editing features so far). So, honestly I'm impressed that they have kept supporting Nik Collection this long already.

Even a couple years ago when I bought this software, it was pretty obvious that it was mostly abandonware and Google weren't planning on improving/adding any new features any time soon.

Awesome! I really like their HDR tool, although it was pretty much the only one I used.

For anyone interested in the history, this product was the result of an acquisition by Google (I think they wanted the team for their Google+ Photos product). While they don't seem interested in developing it further, it's nice that they continue to make the software available.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nik_Software [1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/google-buys-nik-to-...

Google acquired Nik for their mobile photo app Snapped in 2012 [1]

They got the Nik software along with it. At the time each of the tools were sold separately for $100-some (don't exactly remember). Eventually google combined them and priced them together as one package. Today they decided to give it away for free.

As someone else mentioned, it's unclear if it means google will stop developing it or if they opened it up to get more users and use it as a research tool to gather more data on type of filters users use and how they use them. So eventually to apply that to some type of automated filtering solution for android and/or Google photos.

[1] http://mashable.com/2012/09/17/google-acquires-snapseed/

Never heard of these. How do they compare to Lightroom's built in features?

Also interested to hear

it is not a lightroom replacement nor a photoshop one. It has really good filters. my wife and bought it.

I only used Silver Efex. It's more flexible and powerful than basic Lightroom and more specialized than Photoshop. It's great for black and white work, it is a tool specifically made for photography, not a general purpose one.

I've had them since v.1. They're the best photo filters by far. Very usable.

They are complementary. I use the suite with Lightroom all the time. In general I find them super easy to use and they get me the results I want.

Lightroom is both an editor and a photo management collection tool. The Nik collection is editor only.

Its probably not a coincidence, that this appeared on the front page the same day

"Google parent Alphabet ushers in ‘fiscal discipline era’ (usatoday.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11357131

Only supports Macs & Windows, sadly.

Not surprising, given they are for photoshop.

This seems like the rare case where a more descriptive title would really help this item.

I nearly didn't click on it, because I had no idea it was relevant to one of my major interests, photography.

Looks horrific. Tragic over sharpening, crossed with HDR. Best avoided unless you're into instagram filters to disguise cheap phone camera based photography.

Do you need Photoshop or Lightroom to use these tools or do they work standalone as well? I can't find this info on the website at all.

These can be run standalone also (atleast on windows not sure about mac though)

I don't understand how you can run standalone. I just installed it on Windows 10. The only executable is the uninstaller.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like Lightroom (or Photoshop, maybe?) is needed to use the Nik Collection.

If you dig into the folders there are more executables.

They work as Paint Shop Pro add-ins, too.

Oh Crap, now they're probably going to make other individual developer who'e looking for monetizing their apps harder (discloser, I work for Polarr). The only good news for competitor here is that if Google decides to drop further development of it, then the opportunity to emulate and eventually surpass Nik's functionality is huge as well.

The Nikon Collection was a significant piece of software - it used to be a pretty penny for all of them too.

It was much more productive than photoshop, and did some things that just aren't easy to do in PS.

I don't know how google got a hold of it, but it's a great thing for photographers.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/4bsn5a/google_...

Worth looking at for the mention of folks obtaining refunds outside of the advertised period. Only offering refunds to customers in the last 2.5 months seems rough, but it appears that if you contact Google they're offering refunds up to about a year ago.

Any idea if this could work with GIMP using something like the "GIMP PSPI plugin"?

Who else had no idea Google worked on photography software?

I'm not surprised, given the breadth of their investments but this is the first I've heard of it.

They bought Nik Software a while back. This probably means they are done with the software collection and do not plan on making any updates to it.

Hoping for Google Photos integration...

That would require a lot of work. There are parts, at least, of the Nik collection that use deep hooks into Photoshop; it's not just a set of typical 8BA/8BF "give me a pointer to a TIFF I can play with" plugins.

This didn't happen in the last years. I doubt it will happen at all. I think they're more interested in the algorithms to reuse them in Google Apps the one or the other way.

The Nik collection is editor

Reply on news.ycombinator.com