Adobe's AI Tool Is Destroying Its Own Stock Photo Business

[Pieter12]

...On the Q1 FY2026 call, President David Wadhwani said "our traditional stock business saw a steeper decline than we expected. This shift is playing out more quickly than we had planned for".

CFO Dan Durn called the drop "greater-than-anticipated". Firefly is cannibalizing the photo library faster than predicted. CEO Shantanu Narayen, who announced he is stepping down after 18 years, framed it as customers exercising "choice," which is the polite word for displacement...

Adobe’s Own AI Tool Is Destroying Its Own Stock Photo Business. Management Just Admitted It

At $241, Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) screens as deeply discounted. Management just confessed to the exact problem the market has been pricing in for months, and the stock now trades like the confession is terminal rather than transitional. Adobe owns Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Acrobat, and Adobe...

finance.yahoo.com

 

[warden]

I use Adobe stock occasionally for 2D images and music. The music is generally terrible corporate generic stuff, but with patience you can find workable choices and license them. On a lark I tried an AI music generator last week and it was better in every way compared to Adobe, so I imagine AI is not going to be kind to that side of their stock business either.

 

[jvo]

whoops!

 

[RalphLambrecht]

I use Adobe stock occasionally for 2D images and music. The music is generally terrible corporate generic stuff, but with patience you can find workable choices and license them. On a lark I tried an AI music generator last week and it was better in every way compared to Adobe, so I imagine AI is not going to be kind to that side of their stock business either.

who didn't see that coming?

 

[Pieter12]

Although stock agencies pay a pittance for photos, stock is a source of income for many photographers. So Adobe’s loss is a loss for photographers, too. AI is coming for us all.

 

[stevenje]

What comes around, goes around.

I shot a ton of stock photography up until about 2010. My images were all “rights managed only”. For many years I made good money with various stock agencies until the royalty free and micro-stock business models made inroads into stock photography. I did not realize at the time, that my strong stance on controlling my “rights managed only” images business plan was headed to the scrap heap. I did not see the writing on the wall.

The almost unlimited uses for the images and off the cliff falling pricing quickly became a race to the bottom. 99.99% of the stock agencies had to adapt to the royalty free and micro-stock business model or perish.

I could go into the all battles of breach of contract and copyright infringements with the stock agencies that I contributed to, when they started selling my “rights managed only” images under their new business model. Why beat a dead horse.

I could have joined the crowd, but decided not to. I pulled all my images from all the stock agencies and moved on. It was fun while it lasted.

Yours truly,

T-Rex with a Canon F-1