Photo-sharing app Piictu announced today that it’s joining forces with Kandu, a mystery startup owned by Betaworks, and will be closing its own service as a result by the end of the month.
A blog post published by the Piictu team says that Betaworks “shares our vision and ideals of how technology is a catalyst for a better and richer world.” However, the partnership means that the Piictu app will no longer be available to users as of May 31.
“From the entire team we want to thank you for the great energy, trust and support you have brought to the community and we look forward to bringing you more fun, exciting and heartfelt products in the future,” the team added.
We’re excited to announce Piictu is joining Kandu, a betaworks company! Read more on piictu.com
— piictu (@piictu) May 22, 2013
If you’re a diehard fan of the service, however, all is not lost. Piictu says that users will be able to download all of the photographs that they’ve uploaded through the service until June 7.
Simply email piics@piictu.com using the same email address used during the registration process, and then specify which email address you would like them sent to. It’ll take a few days, but Piictu will then send though a file of some description with all of your photographs.
We covered Piictu all the way back in November 2011, when the fledgling startup was graduating from TechStars’ accelerator program in New York City. Rather like Instagram, users were encouraged to upload photos and give them a caption, before watching the flood of photo interactions and responses from other users.
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It’s unclear whether this move is a simple partnership or part of a wider acquisition, but there will undoubtedly be a significant group of users who will be sad to see Piictu close.
We’ve reached out to both parties to understand the reasons behind this move and will update this article if and when we hear back.
Image Credit: Shutterstock/Brian A Jackson
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