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April 01, 2008
Aging photos
Aging photos: I got took by a.viary's "Time Machine" gag last night, despite being firmly in the Anil Dash camp... when I learned that Gabe Rivera will be delisting from Techmeme all those blogs with lame gags, I was very happy. (Right back atcha, baby. ;-) But thanks to a tip from Adobe's Kevin Connor, I've got some links which show the current working in age-progressing photos today... the National Center for Missing Children usually requires about five hours to age-progress a photo, shaping certain segments of the face, and often referencing parental photos. That was as of 2006, for a functional predictive photo -- could be different today, for a demo. There's also work these days in search and integration of remote imagery... the "pterodactyl for bird" and "flintstone car" swaps do seem plausible in an age of networked image synthesis. I greatly respect the work the folks at a.viary are doing, but this gag may not be quite as implausible as some may think....
By the way, since the launch of Adobe Photoshop Express last week, the chattering class has featured articles like "War of the Online Image Editors!" and such. From all I see inside Adobe it's a "coopetition" scene... Adobe is investing in Player and AIR to create a new publishing platform, which anyone can build atop. The more people involved, the more durable and lively the new platform becomes. All the various online image editors are valuable, appreciated. It's a rapidly-evolving field, and the survivors will tend to be those projects which find a unique audience need and satisfy it. I think that within three years we'll see a range of different types of "online image editors", with different interfaces serving different needs. One size won't fit all!
Posted by JohnDowdell at April 1, 2008 08:21 AM
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John, on your last point, I'm afraid that I have to disagree. Adobe has acquired many companies which make use of their products in the past few years. They have also been working on many of their own projects like Photoshop Express which as you point out, makes use of their own platform. I think it's fine for Adobe to be doing this as a "demo" or "proof of concept" of what their platform can do. However, they're taking it much further than that and developing a complete commercial product which will have recurring monthly revenue in its "pro" edition. This is direct competition against sites like picnik.com and what makes it worse for all of these little guys who proudly glorified the flash/flex platform, is that Adobe has at least two unfair advantages over them:
1) Massive brand recognition which allows for much more free publicity/viralness
2) Adobe is actually developing the platform, the standards, etc. so they know how to make their web apps months in advance of the "little guys".
There is no "coopetition" here in my opinion and Adobe's intentions are very obvious. Adobe is realizing that there's much money to be made in switching to "software subscriptions" or an ASP model if you will as opposed to the traditional software model (or really, having a hyrbid of both models). Adobe is strategically preparing for this transition through their many acquisitions and in house projects. I would much prefer if Adobe focused on developing the platforms/tools for design&dev rather than using the platforms/tools themselves to capture more market share from their loyal customers. It's a shame that flash/flex/air developers now have to worry about whether or not Adobe will copy their web apps :-(
I still love Adobe and I commend their massive foray into "openness" over the past couple years, but I am very concerned about this issue of Adobe competing against their own customers.
Posted by: Peter Carabeo-Nieva at April 1, 2008 09:31 AM
Sorry, I'll have to defer to the Photoshop Express team to make their position explicit.
I was trying to fill a gap in the public record, and cannot get in front of their own eventual messaging.
Posted by: John Dowdell at April 1, 2008 11:21 AM
Also John, I agree that we may see many niche image editors sites/apps in the short-term. But in the long-term, image editing will just be an expected and transparent feature in many apps which do much more than just image editing. For example, a social network will embed an "image editing component" which just adds value to the its wider purpose of social networking. The analogy can clearly be seen when you compare image editing to text editing. In earlier days of actionscript (circa flash player 5 and 6), I wrote one of the first rich text editors for flash. It was a complete custom job which required many days of work, rigs, and hundreds of lines of code to get it just right. Nowadays, you can just drop in a perfect rich text editor by using a simple pre-packaged component. I expect that image editors in flash/flex/air will be the same and they'll be totally ubiquitous in any app where images are produced, managed, viewed, etc. Few people will go to a specific site and/or app just to edit their images, the feature will be transparent and taken for granted in a plethora of sites/apps.
Posted by: Peter Carabeo-Nieva at April 1, 2008 12:18 PM
From Gregg Wilensky of Adobe, a photo-aging service:
http://www.aprilage.com/aprilweb.html
Posted by: John Dowdell at April 1, 2008 12:38 PM