Autodesk Acquires Online Photo Editing Service Pixlr

Autodesk, maker of design, engineering and entertainment software, this morning announced that it has acquired online photo editing and sharing service Pixlr.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but Autodesk says the transaction is not expected to have any impact on its recently issued guidance.

Pixlr founder Ola Sevandersson has joined Autodesk.

Pixlr was started in Sweden in August 2008 and offers a suite of cloud-based image tools and utilities such as photo editing tool Pixlr Editor, Pixlr-O-Matic, screengrabbing browser extensions Pixlr Grabber and one-click photo sharing tool imm.io.

The company’s tools are built to enable non-professionals to create, edit, and share images online via social networking services such as Facebook and Flickr.

For Autodesk, the acquisition is a way to expand its line of products for consumers with image editing capabilities. Autodesk SketchBook Pro desktop users, for example, will now be able to read and write image file formats such as PXD and exchange files while maintaining data such as layers.

The acquisition is reminiscent of Google’s purchase of Picnik back in March 2010. Other alternative online photo editing services include FotoFlexer, LunaPic, Splashup and Pixenate.