Adobe to Buy Fotolia Stock Agency

It was announced last week that Fotolia, one of the larger microstock photo online agencies are to be bought by Adobe for $800 million! So what happens to you when Adobe buys Fotolia?

It is too early to tell as to whether this will have any significant effect on its thousands of contributors. However, it is probably worth doing a bit of research on your part if you have invested your time and images online with Fotolia.

Adobe obviously plan to incorporate the images into their Adobe Cloud system. This will make the 34+ million images at Fotolia available to their Creative Cloud subscription users.

I always feel a little uneasy when agencies do this type of thing. Ultimately the photographers tend to lose out in one form or another. I certainly did when Shutterstock went public a few years ago which lost me hundreds of Dollars a month in income.

What will happen to our earnings?

Whether this will increase or decrease revenues for stock photographers is unknown. I still believe that shooting stock photography and video is definitely worth pursuing to create a residual income for your hard work.

After all, if you are out and about and taking photos anyway, why not make a little extra money whilst doing so?

• More info on: Selling stock photography
• Official Adobe Press Release
• Discussion at Microstock Group