We Still Have Adobe Stock. We Just Don't Use It Much Anymore.

The news this week about Getty Images preparing for bankruptcy restructuring made me think about how little we use stock photography in our e-commerce business these days.

For years we had a Shutterstock plan, and later moved to Adobe Stock. There was always something we needed. A background for a newsletter, a banner for one of our stores, Christmas styling, some vector graphics. I also used to get the cover images for our quarterly financial reports from stock libraries.

Lately, I just generate them.

The interesting thing is that we haven't cancelled Adobe Stock. It's still included in our Creative Cloud Pro plan, so it's not even about saving money. We simply don't use it much anymore.

I don't remember making any particular decision to change that. It just happened. At some point, opening a stock library stopped being my first instinct.

When searching for stock photography, you're looking for something that someone else has already created. Sometimes you find exactly what you need, but often you settle for something close enough. With image generation, I can start with what I actually want, including the composition, colours and space needed for text. And if it doesn't work, I generate another version.

I find this slightly amusing given how much of my own time and money I spend on photography. I travel around the world photographing wildlife, buy far too much camera equipment, and care enormously about the quality of an actual photograph. But when I need a background for a Christmas newsletter, I really don't care whether someone spent a day photographing Christmas decorations in a studio.

Of course, Getty's financial problems are more complicated than AI image generation. I'm not suggesting otherwise. But the news made me realise how completely an everyday habit in our business has changed, without us ever deciding to change it.

And I wonder how many other companies still have stock subscriptions that nobody thinks much about opening anymore.