
Google Nik collection now available for free - Numberwang
https://www.google.com/nikcollection/
======
barney54
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.

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FireBeyond
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.

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iamcreasy
Couldn't they add it to Picasa?

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pgodzin
Picasa is dead, Google Photos is the primary photo product

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gfody
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.

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

~~~
gfody
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?

~~~
piyush_soni
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.

~~~
gfody
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.

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adrianmacneil
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nik_Software)
[1] [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/google-buys-nik-
to-...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/google-buys-nik-to-lure-
photographers-to-google-plus/?_r=1)

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salimmadjd
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/](http://mashable.com/2012/09/17/google-acquires-snapseed/)

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r1ch
Never heard of these. How do they compare to Lightroom's built in features?

~~~
micampe
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.

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clumsysmurf
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11357131)

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zeveb
Only supports Macs & Windows, sadly.

~~~
mnx
Not surprising, given they are for photoshop.

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thenomad
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.

~~~
dave2000
Looks horrific. Tragic over sharpening, crossed with HDR. Best avoided unless
you're into instagram filters to disguise cheap phone camera based
photography.

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Hopka
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.

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

~~~
dcuthbertson
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.

~~~
MikeTV
If you dig into the folders there are more executables.

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

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bwang29
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.

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Gratsby
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.

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dergachev
See
[https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/4bsn5a/google_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/4bsn5a/google_are_now_offering_their_nik_collection/)

~~~
SyneRyder
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.

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

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roddux
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.

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nek4life
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.

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bribri
Hoping for Google Photos integration...

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stan_rogers
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.

~~~
shagen
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.

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sandra_saltlake
The Nik collection is editor

