Speaking of Goodshoot, Alan M. Meckler, Chairman and CEO of Jupitermedia, stated that "The acquisition adds another high-quality collection of wholly-owned digitized stock photos to our image offerings, increasing our position as the largest owner of wholly-owned digitized images in the world."

While these recent acquitions have led to JupiterImages rapidly becoming one of the largest firms in the royalty-free stock photo field, its competitors are following a similar approach to snapping up digital content firms. Earlier this year Corbis acquired zefa Visual Media Group, one of the largest image licensing companies in the world, while last month Getty Images purchased Digital Vision, a top royalty-free images provider.

For purchasers of stock photo imagery, this consolidation of what had until recently been a fragmented market is good news. With JupiterImages, Corbis and Getty Images clearly established as the top three image providers, all with a deep content base and in-house talent pool, digital content purchasers are being provided with increasingly sophisticated services on the sites of these companies, as well as access to ever-increasing numbers of quality images without the need to search through a large number of independently owned and operated sites, all with different interfaces and licensing terms. The Adobe Stock Photos service included with the recently-shipped Creative Suite 2 underlines the reality that busy creatives want to find, purchase and use great images as quickly and simply as possible.

The sheer number of images available now makes it possible to target value within some of the collections that can be pulled out and presented as a separate entity, to meet specific concerns of the design community. JupiterImages recently launched PhotoObjects.net, which provides 100,000 royalty-free "photo object images" on a subscription basis. As pre-masked images, they can be quickly used within a wide variety of design and layout software. British illustrator Steve Caplin, whose work has appeared in such publications as The Sunday Times and Men's Health, uses images from PhotoObjects.net for his photo montages. For Caplin, "PhotoObjects.net gives me real people, in dozens of poses and from all angles, that I can combine to make my montages. It's a great bonus that the paths are all drawn at least one pixel in from the edge of an object, which means there's no white fringe when it's lifted from its background." Look for more such specialized content offerings in the future, as stock photo firms increasingly reshape their collections to make their images work harder for them.

Does this pattern of consolidation amongst the three leading image providers spell the beginning of the end for the availability of a wide variety of images from smaller providers? Unlikely. In fact, a quick look at the sites listed in the stock photo categories of the Open Directory or Yahoo indicates that there's still an almost overwhelming number of content providers. For those using or selling stock imagery, this is starting to look like a golden era indeed.