Another day, another recollection from Old Man Nack. 👴🏻
It’s funny to see things come to fruition… at their own… damn… pace. Back when we shipped Bridge in 2005, photographers were extraordinarily pissed. They hated the presence of royalty-free stock search in that app. They saw Adobe as making them purchase & underwrite the seeds of their livelihoods’ destruction. They weren’t wrong, though that first incarnation of Adobe Stock Photos cratered with barely a whimper.
Cut to 2016, Adobe has spent $800 million buying a stock photo provider (about which no one made a peep), and now A) you can upload your own photos to Adobe Stock right within Bridge, and B) you can search for stock photos—now including those from Reuters—right within Photoshop proper (something I tried to enable in Mini Bridge).
What does all this mean? I dunno—blah blah about things being ahead of their time, the inevitable commodification/increasing access to art, something like that. “And on it goes, this thing of ours…”
Hi John,
Well that made me smile 🙂
I noticed the stock integration too and noticed that I didnt get angry.
Apparently there is still some money in stock photography – it goes to the aggregators who can farm the content at very little cost.
Cant complain too much we have had trickle up economics for quite a time now in a wide variety of industries.
Anyhow Im finished with that fight, happy now to work on good projects with nice clients and avoid the milking industry.
I remember that original pairing of Adobe and stock photography. And I remember its demise…