Digital Image Suite Cancelled

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.