Adobe Shuts Down Stock Photos Service
Adobe has announced it will discontinue Adobe Stock Photos, its royalty-free image service, which shipped as part of Adobe Bridge. Stock Photos will be shut down April 1, 2008.
First introduced as part of the Adobe CS2 package, Stock Photos was touted as a one-stop image shopping solution. The goal was to provide a convenient way for photographers to search across multiple image libraries at once and purchase royalty-free images.
Unfortunately for Adobe, it would seem that no one wanted Stock Photos.
Adobe has posted an FAQ that covers common questions about the closure, including what existing customers can expect. The short version is that you have until March 3 to search for images and until March 31 buy any image you’ve downloaded.
For those of us who never wanted Adobe Stock Photo there are uninstallers available for both Mac and Windows, which will let you get the application clutter off your hard drive.
The FAQ doesn’t really address the reasoning behind the closure, but presumably lack of interest from users was a major factor. Those that were fans of Stock Photo may well be wondering if some other service is coming to take its place.
Although he doesn’t offer anything specific, Adobe Photoshop Senior Product Manager John Nack writes on his blog that “we’re working hard to make Photoshop, Bridge, and the other Creative Suite apps much more easily extensible so that they can support whatever services customers find useful—whether from Adobe or from third parties.”
Perhaps Adobe has learned something from Firefox — third party add-ons offer more flexibility than in-house ideas. A more flexible extension framework could even turn up a cool Bridge plugin for searching creative commons licensed images on services like Flickr or Picasa.
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