Adobe Stock Photos, R.I.P.
Author of this post: Tara MacKay | About Blog Authors »Apparently not all of Adobe’s products are as essential as Photoshop and Illustrator. This month, Adobe announced that it will cease to operate its relatively new service, Adobe Stock Photos.
The Adobe Stock Photos service was introduced in 2005, but it wasn’t heavily promoted until 2007, when Adobe released Creative Suite 3. The service provides users access to numerous royalty-free stock photo libraries, including those maintained by Masterfile, Getty and JupiterImages, and everything occurs via the Adobe Bridge interface.
Say goodbye to Adobe Stock Photos in Bridge.
The Adobe Stock Photos concept was a good one; it’s like an iTunes Store for royalty-free images. But for numerous reasons, the service never caught on. Here’s why:
ASP dealt almost exclusively with the “expensive” stock libraries. Designers working on big-budget projects often use such resources, but those with less to spend or those in of only small, lower-res images almost never do. ASP thus had little to offer customers in these latter categories.
Also, big-budget designers were typically already committed to a single stock photo company, or they already had an effective image searching process in place. Either way, ASP was a little late to the game.
But let’s turn our attention back to that first reason, because that’s what’s most interesting about all of this. When the shutdown was announced, many considered it proof of the popularity of “microstock.” Stock photo resources, like dreamstime.com and istockphoto.com, allow professional and non-professional photographers alike to submit photos, which designers may then purchase cheaply, sometimes for $1 or less. No one expected that the quality of these photos would rival that of the images available via the big libraries, but the offerings are, in fact, comparable. As a result, microstock sites have become quite popular even among big-budget designers.
In light of these circumstances, Adobe Stock Photos suddenly seems much less innovative. It’s still like the iTunes Stores, but only if Apple sold music on vinyl for $10 instead of in MP3 format for 99 cents.
All reasoning and speculation aside, if you run CS there are some steps you should take, whether or not you used the ASP service. If you never used it, all you really need to do is download the uninstaller from this page and launch the app. It should remove all traces of the program from your computer.
If you are an Adobe Stock Photos user, you can purchase and download comps up until March 31, 2008, but as of March 3, 2008, search will be prohibited. If you’ve downloaded a comp and want to purchase it after March 31, you’ll have to look to the file’s metadata to see what stock library it came from and then visit that library’s website to make your purchase. More information is available on the Adobe Stock Photos FAQ page.
