The Digital Image Suite family of products for organizing and editing digital photos and other images has been cancelled. The products, which ranged in price from about US$20 to US$100, occupied an uneasy niche between the free photo editing and management software bundled with most digital cameras and Adobe's more full-featured products for serious amateurs, such as Photoshop Elements (US$79 and up). A steady series of discounts and bundling deals—such as the incorporation of a video-editing suite gained in the Microsoft acquisition of Pinnacle Software (in Digital Image Suite Plus 2006, introduced in late 2005), and a value pack including free magazine subscriptions and online photo printing (in Digital Image Suite Anniversary Edition, introduced in late 2006)—failed to generate momentum for the product.

With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft incorporated many of the features of the Digital Image product line into a free bundled application called Windows Photo Gallery, similar to the way that Apple bundles its iPhoto application with every Macintosh computer. This further reduced the market for a stand-alone version of Digital Image Suite.

OEMs who previously bundled Digital Image products now have two choices. On higher-end PCs, particularly those meant to counter Apple's success in the market for digital media-savvy consumers, OEMs could bundle a product like Elements to offer consumers a full-featured digital editing and organization product. On other PCs, OEMs can ship Vista and let end users decide whether the included Photo Gallery is sufficient for their needs. In either case, the cancellation of Digital Image means good news for Adobe, which now faces one less competitor in the low end of the imaging software market. In the market for higher-end design tools, however, Microsoft's new Expression line of graphic design tools may challenge more advanced Adobe products, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver.

Specific Digital Image products that have been cancelled include Digital Image Suite Plus Anniversary Edition, Digital Image Suite Plus, and Digital Image Standard. All customers will receive product support for three years from the purchase date or through Apr. 30, 2010, whichever comes first.

The Digital Image Suite home page with the announcement of its cancellation is at www.microsoft.com/products/imaging/default.mspx.

Windows Photo Gallery is described in "Vista Bundles Consumer Tools, Applications" on page 7 of the May 2007 Update.