Google Rained On My Picnik!

I'm a big fan/user of Google services, from Gmail to Reader, Docs to Calendar, not to mention "search" obviously.

So I wasn't too concerned when back in March 2010 Google bought the online photo-editing suite Picnik, which has been my photo-editor of choice for more years than I can remember.

But when I logged on today along with millions of other users, I discovered that the picnik was - quite literally - over...

Noooooooooooooo......

Picnik was the perfect simple image editor for me to crop and re-size images for my articles and blogs.  Hell, I cropped and re-sized the screenshot above using it!  There is also a very handy addon for Firefox which enables me to send web images to Picnik with just two mouse-clicks.

The official announcement tries to soften the blow by allowing users to download all their previously used images (not an issue for me), and by making the previously premium features free (nice, but I don't particularly need or want those features).

The Picnik team are going to be working on photo-editing across other Google products, notably Google+.  Now, I am a user of Google+ but I don't understand 1) why I should have to use a social network for photo-editing, and 2) how ANYONE is benefiting from closing Picnik!

Oh, well...it's just a website and life goes on. Google own it and if they really want to kill it, that's up to them. But it will make my work harder in the short-term and I may have to find another online photo-editing service.  Any suggestions?