iStock Releases Plug-In For Adobe CS6
Getty images owned photo microstock agency, iStockphoto have announced a plug-in to enable users of Adobe Creative Suite (CS) 6 applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to access their range of stock images:
“With the iStockphoto Plug-in for Adobe® Creative Suite®, you can browse, download and edit photos and illustrations without ever leaving Photoshop®, Illustrator® or InDesign®. Crop them, resize them and make them your own, directly from the Creative Suite” [Read More]
In March we covered Getty’s moves to introduce their Connect API which would allow third party DAM systems to retrieve assets directly from Getty (with integrated billing to track usage). It seems fairly clear that the more established media owners are increasingly eager to integrate directly with tools that prospective image buyers will use. There has been considerable interest in APIs across all points in the digital media supply chain (from DAM vendors through to media owners and buyers) and we expect to see both faster development and cross-industry conflict in this area.
Last month, Matt Mullen, writing on the Real Story Group blog noted that APIs are not Lego – a reference to the fact that using APIs is not as trivial as merely sticking systems together. A key impending issue for many of the API initiatives in the digital media supply chain will be incompatibility between these protocols. While initiatives like CMIS promise to improve the interoperability of ECM and DAM, the take-up amongst vendors has not been as great as one would have hoped. Part of the problem is that it’s quite easy to develop a DAM product (especially with the vast number of Cloud platforms, toolkits etc now available) but if you want to make your custom software that you’ve just sold to 2-3 customers compliant with the aforementioned standards then either a re-write and/or retro-fit is in prospect and the economics of that don’t stack up for the hundreds of smaller vendors that constitute a major section of the DAM industry. It’s probably the same for quite a few of the larger ones also (especially those with legacy products that are still in active use).
It will be interesting to see whether the tail wags the dog with this one and if customers of DAM systems begin to demand that their products interoperate with each other before their vendor of choice offers it as an ‘out of the box’ standard function. If I were buying a DAM solution these days, having to add to my budget a not inconsiderable sum in the form of customisation and consulting fees to get my department, enterprise and custom media/content management products to all ‘sing from the same hymn sheet’ would not be welcome and might result in the whole initiative getting put on ice for a year or two until the market has sorted itself out (by whatever commercial means that might entail).
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