It made a giant noise as it caught everyone by surprise — $230 million investment in a company providing photo services.  After Adobe’s $800 million purchase of French microstock photo company Fotolia, Pond 5’s $64 million investment and Shutterstock’s  $76.5 million IPO, it is the highest figures ever seen investedContinue Reading

Shoebox

Last week Shoebox announced it’s closing its door on May 22nd, signifying the end of an era when one innovative cloud-based photo management/synching solution after another came to market in the 2010-2015 timeframe. Founded in 2012, Shoebox has always stood out to me for its novel interface, which enabled users to search for photosContinue Reading

About a week ago, Unsplash announced that they had raised $7.25 million, along with plans to bring cryptocurrency to its free stock photo service. While most see their move as a potential Shutterstock killer,  Unsplash  could end up becoming a  potent competitor to Instagram, Pinterest, and Snap as they share more DNAContinue Reading

Outside of Instagram, the biggest success in the world of photo apps is certainly Facetune.  With millions of paid downloads, it was the number one paid app in over 120 countries. The creation of 5 Israeli friends, it certainly benefited from Instagram’s success and especially its insatiable appetite for selfies.Continue Reading

Hidden deep inside Apple’s WWDC 17 was an announcement that made little waves but that might have great repercussion: In their OS11 release, the Cupertino company plans to store images using their new HEIF format rather the almighty JPEG. The reason? HEIF compression takes half the space of the JPEG compression, suddenly doublingContinue Reading

It’s the platform, stupid Just as the world finally figured out why Snap relabeled itself as a camera company, last week Facebook proclaimed it’s not just a camera company, it’s a camera company built on the world’s ambitious augmented reality platform. Let’s add some perspectives to their F8 announcements: Recently,Continue Reading

The 2015 year ends pretty much as it started. Some promises were delivered, some fell short. At least for now. With mobile continuing to dominate as the number one gateway to the online experience and visual being its strongest appeal, one would have thought that visual tech would have explodedContinue Reading

adobe stock

Will convenience be the powerful  feature to  make Adobe’s $800 million gamble succeed in the stock photo market? Launched amidst a flurry of Creative Cloud updates for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, Adobe Stock is a fully integrated stock photo offering within the company’s flagship product. Created with the content ofContinue Reading

Adobe announced that they will discontinue Photoshop Touch, its comprehensive photo editing app, as part of a strategy to release apps with narrower use cases, such as Photoshop Mix (compositing), Photoshop Sketch (drawing), Adobe Shape (bitmap-to-vector conversion), and soon-to-be-released Rigel, for retouching. Before I share my take on this, itContinue Reading