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.
