Flickr, the social photos service that was bought by Yahoo! back in 2005 is moving away from Piknik as its integrated image editing services and moving to Aviary. The move comes a couple of months after Google announced the closing of the independent Piknik product as the team behind it have become fully integrated into Google HQ.
This is not, however, a downgrade for Flickr users – as I personally have long held that Aviary was the leading web-based multimedia editing suite available with Phoenix for editing photographs, Raven for editing vectors, Myna for music editing, and many more. The best part about the Aviary suite is, however, that is is built with HTML5 rather than Flash, and as such is sitting ready to embrace image editing on tablets and smartphones.
With suites like Aviary available at your fingertips for free, there is becoming less and less of a need for expensive editing suites such as Adobe Photoshop outside of the professional arena. That this deal integrates Aviary’s features right into Flickr for image hosting and sharing means that it couldn’t be easier. These are just the sort of deals that Yahoo! should be making if they are going to get their house in order.