Adobe’s Stock Contributor enters beta

Adobe is going all out with their stock photo service. After integrating it with their CC applications, announcing plans to revolutionize the stock industry, and printing stock photos on t‑shirts, we are getting a way to contribute our own photos…and vectors…and videos. Adobe wants it all; with the new Adobe Stock contributor site, you can give it to them. It’s a relatively simple platform for uploading files and selling them. It will also keep you informed of your files’ status during the approval process, and, of course, track your sales.  In addition to dragging and dropping files into the browser, you can also upload via FTP, which is useful for anyone with a lot of large files to upload. It should be noted that video uploads are only uploaded via FTP. The service is currently in beta, but it’s already got some great features. Let’s start with the obvious: Adobe CC integration. There’s already a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge that will allow you to upload stock photos to the Stock Contributor site right from those apps. So don’t bother opening a browser window. Once you’re happy with a photo, just set it to upload, and move right on to the next one. [pullquote]If we want to see an end to the kinds of stock photos that get ironically printed onto t‑shirts, Adobe users will have to contribute something better[/pullquote] Secondly, Adobe is using machine learning to automatically assign keywords to uploaded photos based on similar images. Just upload, check the keywords, get rid of any that don’t apply, and add any you feel are missing. For people who upload a lot of photos at once, this should save a lot of time. Of course, this is machine learning. It won’t be perfect. However, it will get better as more people use it, and more images are uploaded. It’ll be fun to see how good computers get at identifying objects in photos. Adobe has made much of their plans to revolutionize stock as a concept. The truth of the matter is that they’ll be selling the media that we upload. If we want to see an end to the kinds of stock photos that get ironically printed onto t‑shirts, Adobe users will have to contribute something better. Like other companies before it, Adobe’s just giving us an easy way to do that, and perhaps even profit from it. Almost makes me want to dust off my camera and hunt down my cats.