*** From the Archives ***
This article is from October 3, 2011, and is no longer current.
PR: Silicon Publishing announces ground-breaking extension to Adobe’s InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop
Los Angeles, CA, October 3, 2011 — Silicon Publishing and Fotolia announced an exciting new extension that incorporates over 14 million stock photos directly into Adobe’s Creative Suite.
The extension lets users browse, manage, and incorporate stock photos from Fotolia.com directly within Adobe’s Creative Suite applications including Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop. Developed by Silicon Publishing, this new extension streamlines creative workflow by providing easy access to all of Fotolia’s premium content.
The development team at Silicon Publishing developed the extension in just 3 months, leveraging their collective experience as industry experts and as former Adobe engineers. They worked intensively to create interactions with Fotolia’s 14 million images, which include features such as on-the-fly replacement of design comp images with high-resolution versions.
“We are thrilled with the new CS Extension technology from Adobe. It’s evolved into a robust solution for developers wanting to extend Adobe’s multiple creative applications with a single development effort. It’s enabled us to use Adobe Flex to create a single CS Extension that connects Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator to Fotolia assets,” said Olav Martin Kvern of Silicon Publishing.
“Fotolia is proud to be the first major stock photo agency to leverage Adobe’s new CS Extension technology with Silicon Publishing. Their expertise and knowledge of the creative process is amazing, and we think all designers will benefit from this technology”, said Oleg Tscheltzoff, CEO of Fotolia LLC.
The extension is available to download at https://www.fotolia.com/adobeplugin
About Fotolia
Over 2.5 million people prefer Fotolia for affordable, royalty-free images, graphics and HD videos. With the introduction of the Infinite Collection, Fotolia became the first worldwide microstock organization to offer both crowd-sourced and professional images on one site. Founded in New York City in 2004, Fotolia spans the globe with websites in 12 languages and offices in 14 countries. With over 14 million files to choose from, find it on Fotolia.com.
About Silicon Publishing
Silicon Publishing is a leading developer of web-to-print, web-to-web, multi-channel, and other automated publishing solutions. By blending core technologies like Adobe Scene7 and InDesign Server with our own innovations, we enable our customers to automate and produce high-quality content for any medium. We have over a decade of experience implementing best-of-class publishing solutions for some of the world’s top brands.
 |
This is pretty good. Faster than Mini-Bridge and an online database of images :D
I tried the plugin and it’s really good. And I showed some colleagues. Then I compared Fotolia price plan to our current stock site, and Fotolia won hands down. Going to get a yearly subscription now :)
Thanks for the update. This is pretty nifty.
Not bad but I can’t see how it does what they claim: “which include features such as on-the-fly replacement of design comp images with high-resolution versions.” You have to go to their website to purchase them, you also still have to use the links panel and calculate the resolution needed. Now if it did those tasks in InDesign it would be a reason to shift.
It is brand new and still in beta, but those features (mentioned by Stix) are on the way… that is actually the easy, fun part. Harder was working around Lion/InDesign issues and drag-and-drop weirdness in photoshop/CS Extensions, such that it basically works across CS5/5.5, Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop, and Windows/Mac (multiple versions of each). Yes, the original vision and intent was to keep the whole purchase right inside InDesign, and calculate the cheapest possible size appropriate for usage based on what the user has done with the comps. First it will be updated to keep the whole transaction in InDesign, then we will see what is possible for the sizing.
That said, it does now have a button that will replace the comp image with the purchased image, so it lives up to the basic wording of the PR: not sure if that version is on the site yet, but definitely check back for updates.
Nice job on the extension Max, I’ve just installed it in InDesign and it works well. I could never get Mini-Bridge to work! Looking forward to the ongoing development of the extension and like Euqene it’s probably time to buy some credits on Fotolia.
Hey, we’ll get there! While we have been working on it for three months, most of the time has been spent understanding the Fotolia API and working around some very weird bugs (opening a standard file browser from within a CS extension crashes Lion? Who knew? Photoshop can’t access its DOM from an event handler function? Who knew?*). We’ve made good progress, but there’s much more to come. Stay tuned.
Thanks,
Ole
* Bob Stucky knew, actually, but that’s another story.
Regarding resolution calculation, etc.–I really want to do those things, but a.) it’s getting difficult to fit everything into the panel UI, and b.) these would be InDesign-only features (the Photoshop and Illustrator object models just don’t give us the kind of information we need to do it in those applications). I’m thinking that the thing to do is to create an InDesign-only panel for working with Fotolia images at that level of detail. Again, we’re writing this stuff as fast as we can, and, boy, are our arms tired!
Thanks,
Ole
Sounding good! Let’s talk about the opposition, “I Stock Images”. They’re rapidly losing popularity round here because they both keep jacking up their prices for points and the amounts of points needed to buy an image, and now have a lot of images that are very expensive as well. I got a scare when looking on Fotolia for the first time as the best images for my first search was an Infinite one and about 100 times what their normal cost is, if they had some commitment to remaining a reasonably priced site we’d switch wholesale. This app would be the icing on the cake, and the reason we looked at them in the first place.
I use istock photo. And it’s ok. Some images are very expensive, around the 70 – 100 credits which works out roughly 80 – 115 euros.
Had a look at the Fotolia site and found the same images on there that I bought on istock and they were for less credits (7) whereas on istock they were more (10).
And fotolia credits seem to be a bit cheaper. Looking at their pricing plan I’ll be going with the monthly option of 50 images per month for a year, work out at ?810 for the year. I’ve already spent triple that on istock in the last year.
Well I’m a big fan of istockphoto.com personally. Haven’t found any images that are too expensive, and the company is great and quite proactive with the InDesign user community. So it would be cool to be able to access any stock photo source via a single extension in InDesign.
In the meantime this fotolalia-only solution definitely sounds intriguing and I’ll be checking it out.
The forums on istock have been amazing. I’ve posted image requests in there and had people put together whole lightboxes to share with me. I’ve had others go out of their way and setup the photoshoot and make it available to purchase and the forums over there are just great for finding the right photo when you’re finding it tough
The build that was updated today at https://www.fotolia.com/adobeplugin is now quite a bit better. There is a quick demo of the “magic button” at https://youtu.be/luxCybFmNmM – going from comp images to live purchased images should be useful. It appears that we will be evolving this for some time, so any feedback or ideas are appreciated.
Hi Max
I am getting an Error – “The destination ‘$plugin\Extensions\’ contains an invalid token. The extension will not be installed.
Windows XP – InDesign CS5
Any ideas?
Still no word back and still not working… anyone got any ideas?
Sorry, taking some time for us to get an XP box to test with… we were testing Vista and Windows 7. Should be able to let you know by the weekend if we can reproduce the issue.
You are running as administrator? If not, that could be a problem, yet I doubt it would have the message you cite. Surfing around I found this… https://forums.adobe.com/message/2967410
Is it Win XP 64 or 32 bit?
Will let you know when we test in that environment…
I was unable to double click to unpack it. Well Cs5 Extension Manager would fail trying to extract it.
I was able to use WinRar to extract the content and then run the file directly from the extracted content. And that has worked.
Thanks for all your help.
Has the error ?The destination ?$plugin\Extensions\? contains an invalid token. The extension will not be installed.” ever been fixed? PS5 64-bit. I tried the plugin a b it ago and couldn’t install it, getting the above error. Any news on this?
Bob, PS, is that short for”PhotoShop”?
@Bob: Elsewhere on this site, I wrote: One of the developers wrote me about your problem: ?They probably have an older build. Also, they might get this message if they haven?t uninstalled any earlier versions. It was developed in Window 7 64 bit, so there shouldn?t be a problem there.? and Eugene added: “I had an issue similar to that Stix I had to use WinRar to extract the content and then run the file directly from the extracted content. And that has worked.”
@David. OK. I had to get WinRAR to unpack it and it is now installed. But wouldn’t you agree that this process in a long way round and quite unintuitive for something developed in Win 7 64?
@Bob: You don’t have to unpack it to install it. It’s a ZXP, which is a zip archive, for sure, but you don’t need to open it up–and shouldn’t open it up. Instead, you install it using the CS5/CS5.5 Extension Manager.
To install a ZXP in Windows 7, select the Extension Manager, then use the Context menu to select “Run As Administrator.” Simply being logged in as an Administrator won’t do the trick. (Note that this is true for all CS Extensions, even the ones from Adobe.) Then use the Extension Manager to open and install the extension.
Thanks,
Ole
I understand that, but as the thread shows, some of us get an error when we try to use the Extension Manager. We are trying t find out that the problem is that is giving us that error.
As said above I had installation problems, I found you can also unpack it with 7zip.
Hi Stix and Bob,
How do you install it after opening the archive? (Just about any method you’d use to open a Zip archive will work, by the way–but you shouldn’t have to do it. I’m on Win7 Ultimate 64 bit, and it installs as expected from the ZXP after uninstalling any previous versions.)
Thanks,
Ole
@ Olav, after unpacking with 7zip I got a folder with among other things in it a file called FotoliaDemo.zxp, which I double clicked and it installed fine from there. I am 99% sure that I didn’t have another version installed previously as this is a new machine for me. I did have it installed earlier on another computer running XP though.
Thanks a lot!