Today’s Question: Do you think Google’s announcement that the Nik Collection is now free means the end of the Nik Collection?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes. I suspect we will never see another update to the Nik Collection, as noted in the latest episode of Tim Grey TV (https://youtu.be/2Z0pYDysVDU).
More Detail: When Google originally acquired Nik Software, there was speculation that Google was really only interested in the Snapseed app for mobile devices. Rumors swirled that staff from Nik Software had been let go, and everything I heard suggested there would not be any updates to the Nik Collection.
I was a bit surprised when shortly after the acquisition there was an update to Analog Efex Pro, but I suspect that was just a matter of delivering an update that had already been nearly complete before the acquisition.
In the announcement posted on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/+NikCollection/posts/AFGsG2Di7EK), part of the explanation indicates that, “As we continue to focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile, including Google Photos and Snapseed, we’ve decided to make the Nik Collection desktop suite available for free….” Perhaps that means that means the Nik Collection will be updated and still be offered for free, similar to other apps that are available. But I interpret this statement as an indication that this is the end of the line for the Nik Collection.
I’ve been a big fan of many of the tools in the Nik Collection, and continue to use several of those tools in my workflow. I would love to see future updates to make these tools even better than they already are, but I suspect that won’t be the case.