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Fotolia Launches iTunes-Like Desktop App For Purchasing Stock Photos

Leena Rao

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Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
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Microstock photography giant Fotolia is moving to the desktop today with the launch of an Adobe AIR-powered desktop app to purchase stock photos. Fotolia currently has two million registered members who use the service.

Compatible with Mac OSX and Windows, the application puts Fotolia’s collection of over nine million images in a desktop app. The app has a number of features not available in Fotolia’s web app, including the ability to buy and download images with one click, a drag and drop interface, bulk image download capabilities, unlimited gallery creation and better search. The interface is comparable to a less-sleek version of iTunes. While the desktop app may not be something that an occasional Fotolia user will find useful, it is sure to be popular among daily users of the stock photo site.

Fotolia has a had a big year. The company took a massive round of investment last year from TA Associates last year and has been steadily growing its userbase. It reached one million registered users and five million images for sale last February, introduced microstock video in April, hired an iStockPhoto co-founder in May, and launched a royalty-free photo site called PhotoXpress.

The site also rolled out an add-in ribbon for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint 2007 that gives users instant access to the company’s vast library of images and vectors from within the application. And the company just launched an Animoto-like video slideshow site Flixtime.

Crunchbase

Company: Fotolia
Website: us.fotolia.com
Launch Date: January 1, 2005
Funding: $225M

Fotolia is a low-priced stock photography site, offering over 16 million images for publishing and advertising, at prices as low as $0.75 per photo. Unlike the two major players in stock photo sales (Corbis and Getty), Fotolia’s images are mostly from semi-pro and amateur photographers, though the photos are of similar quality. Fotolia photographers earn 30%-60% of the sales revenue from their images. In an effort to compete with Corbis and Getty, Fotolia introduced a service called Infinite Collection...

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