Adobe Stock Photos . . .

By Ron Rovtar
Managing Editor


"Trust us."

That's the message James Alexander would like photographers and small stock distributors to get while his new Adobe Stock Photos division gets going.

"What I can offer you is Adobe's 20-year track record -- our approach to business," said Alexander. "I hope the photo-community will look at these before it draws any conclusions. After all, Adobe doesn't have a business if it doesn't have professional photographers as customers."

Alexander, who is director of the new Adobe stock photography division, has had to deal with considerable consternation about both his division and Adobe's new approach to getting images to stock buyers.

With the recent release of Creative Suite 2 (CS2), Adobe customers can now search for, purchase and import royalty-free stock photography without leaving the well-known collection of graphics programs that includes Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and GoLive.

Until now, using stock images in graphics applications always required several steps outside these programs. The steps are not complicated, but they can be annoying as they halt the creative flow while stock buyers open a browser. search several web sites, locate an image, download it and import it into a design, web page or other computer document.

The Adobe approach promises significant workflow advantages. At the same time, this streamlined approach provides Adobe with a potentially enormous advantage as a new stock distributor.

It is conceivable that Adobe could eventually control the vast majority of routine stock transactions, even though the San Jose, CA, company offers no images of its own, preferring instead to repackage imagery offered by other companies like Photodisc and Digital Vision (both owned by Getty Images), Jupitermedia, Amana, Royalty Free by Zefaimages and others. Adobe expects to add additional suppliers this year, said Alexander, and more next year.

But Adobe has been vague about its plans and this alone is enough to make many people very nervous -- especially suppliers of stock photography, including individual photographers and small to mid-sized stock distributors.

Suppliers have good reason to be concerned about several questions:

Who will Adobe include and who will the company leave out?

How much money will Adobe skim off each sale?

Will rights-managed stock eventually find its way into the mix ?

Will individual photographers or groups of photographers acting in their own best interests someday get direct access to this channel, or will Adobe Stock Photos be just another big company toll booth skimming another share of the revenues that used to go to the image creators?

Understanding the new Adobe approach takes a little concentration. First of all, Adobe has no obvious intention of creating its own image library. In fact, Adobe will keep no images on its own servers. Instead, Alexander said, image requests will be fulfilled from the servers of participating stock libraries. Adobe will simply package the images for download, add metadata about the images and, when a sale is made, handle the billing. The metadata will include information about the primary supplier and a link to the licensing agreement, Alexander said.

The Adobe executive said CS2 will let users quickly see larger versions of the images and flag for later viewing those they like the best. He said the Adobe programs will even remind creative professionals when they have a comp (low resolution) image in a design so that they do not export the design before purchasing the high resolution version.

To those concerned about where this will take the stock industry, Alexander offers some information, But, citing Adobe Systems policy prohibiting talk about unreleased products, he leaves some questions unanswered or only partly answered.

"Our plan, at the moment, is to be as inclusive as we can be, " said Alexander, trying to allay fears about who will or will not be included. But, he added, "Each supplier must agree to a high level of performance."

"The way we chose the first group of companies was that we went to creative professionals and asked what companies they use. These were the companies that they used the most. "

He did not rule out the possibility that groups of photographers may someday be allowed into the Adobe Stock Photos mix, cutting out additional layers in the distribution chain.

Alexander flatly refused to reveal how much his company will take from each stock sale. And, he said Adobe has no plans to license technology that would let other photography suppliers offer images in exactly the same way as Adobe Stock Photos.

He did say Adobe would like to license rights-managed stock -- but only if the industry can create a simpler version of the price-per-use model.

He noted that a high percentage of online rights-managed sales fail, partly because buyers know they can get up to 20 percent off if they call the distributor directly. In addition, he added, online rights-managed sales are complicated and need to be simplified.

"We would need to have about 95 percent of the rights-managed transactions go through for this to make sense for us," Alexander asserted.

He noted that Adobe has been very active in the PLUS, a non-profit group that wants to standardize language used in image licensing as well as some image licensing practices. Many industry professionals believe standardized language and procedures are necessary before a truly automated rights-managed package can be designed.

Alexander added, however, that it is ultimately up to the photographic community to come up with a fully-simplified rights-managed approach ( see Stock Asylum's article on this issue ).

Betsy Reid, executive director of StockArtistsAlliance, a professional group of rights-managed stock photographers, said her organization would want to take part in any discussions about creating a simplified rights-managed approach.

"I am personally very interested in pursuing that on behalf of photographers," Reid said. "We absolutely have to find a way to make the license-by-use model compete with royalty-free."

She cautioned, however, that "We just have to be very careful about how we do something like this."

Despite concerns raised from many quarters, Alexander asserted that the creation of Adobe Stock Photos was motivated by Adobe's desire to improve workflow for creative professionals.

He noted that, in addition to the stock service, Adobe is creating a listing of assignment photographers and a listing of rights-managed distributors, both of which can also be accessed through the programs in CS2.

"It was very clear that there is a lot of pain around licensing stock photography today," Alexander said. "I'm not trying to run a stock business. I'm trying to find really creative ways for people to buy images that they didn't have yesterday."

"We really value the relationships that we have with our customers." We're not going to get it 100 percent right and we're not going to please everybody. But, if at the end of the day we can provide opportunities to our customers, we're happy," he said.

In another matter, Adobe has announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based Macromedia. The proposed merger gets Adobe new tools for mobile devices, the popular Flash animation technology, the Dreamweaver web design program and a number of other software packages that compete directly with Adobe programs. Dreamweaver, for example, competes strongly against Adobe's GoLive.

In addition, Macromedia's Freehand competes with Adobe Illustrator, and Fireworks is a modest competitor for Photoshop, one of Adobe's flagship programs.

Should the acquisition pass government regulatory hurdles and close, it will put Adobe so far ahead of any competition that the company will have a near stranglehold on this market. In fact, antitrust worries were among the reasons Adobe's stock price dropped nearly 10 percent the day this deal was announced. Investors also were concerned about Adobe's ability to integrate the two companies' cultures and software.

Adobe Systems, Inc., can be found at: http://www.adobe.com

Macromedia, Inc, can be found at: http://www.macromedia.com