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Pixmac now reselling Dreamstime images

Steve Gibson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:25:14 +0000

Microstocki agency Pixmac have announced that they are now reselling Dreamstime images and have added a new 'luxury' collection of macrostocki priced content from image source. This in addition to their own microstock collection, celebrity images and reselling of images from Fotolia.

The site now features a series of tabs that allows buyers to easily select from the various collections.

Being able to buy images from two of the biggest microstock agencies in one place is by far the most interesting news here. I know from my own limited experience in buying that I sometimes have to visit several microstock agencies to find the right image and in some cases then go to alamy if desperate... Most buyers don't know or don't care where the images came from, what matters is that for their search terms they find a result and from there it's easy to pay and download the image; this is especially true for microstock buyers many of whom have never bought a stock photo before or do so quite infrequently.

The new 'luxury' collection is not another premium microstock, it offers access to a macrostock priced collection of 100,000 images from one agency, but conceivably could be used to resell a wider range of macrostock content. We can contrast this with veer offering microstock images to their existing macrostock client base.

We don't yet know how many Dreamstime images are available from Pixmac, as with Fotolia I expect the number to grow over the next few months, it took many months for 'several million' FTi images to be included.

The History

I'd be the first to say I was not always a fan of pixmac, by their own admission they launched too early before everything was quite ready and in doing so caused some confusion and upset to parts of the (easily upset?) microstock contributor community. Over the past 12 months they have been continually improving their site and their marketing, a pixmac blog post from August outlines some of the improvements and answers photographers concerns.

Pixmac have introduced several features to make them stand out from the start-up crowd, the ability to buy an image in three minutes without need to register being I think one of the biggest innovations. Time and again in e-commerce we learn that the easier it is to buy the more sales are made - signing up for an account, confirming emails, in some cases adding the image again to a basket then going through payment to finally download is something that microstock could get away with because of the dangled carrot of a cheap image. Now that lots of agencies offer similar prices, and often the same images, the differentiator is search and ease of use. Pixmac offer the price concious a credit based option, and those a hurry the ability to solve their image needs without questions like "how many credits would you like to buy".

Is this the Future?

Future of buying any image conveniently from just one location might be many years away in a seemingly utopian internet of semantic tagged self organising photos, this is clearly only a tiny step there. There is currently no standardisation in the APIs used to resell stock photos, and despite how modern and great we might all think IPTCi data and controlled vocabulary's are, searching images with words is still incredibly difficult in a world where search engines simply scan page titles and the 'words located somewhere around an image'. Yes there are various services that search several microstock agencies like cyclo.ps and the picniche search bar but they hardly make the buying process more convenient, you still need accounts at each of the agencies.

Having everything in one place has lots of advantages but also some disadvantages and so still leaves plenty of marketplace for niche agencies and (something I've been waiting to see for some time) niche collections of pre-selected images sourced from one or more microstock agencies then sold via a specially targeted conduit (that conduit being a niche website, or built into an application).

The Effect

Microstock is nothing without the buyers and nothing without the photographers or artists who contribute. For me and a lot of other photographers pixmac asks questions none of which this announcement answers, in fact with my images already on dreamstime and fotolia do I even continue to upload? For the present, yes, submission is easy; I can make a larger cut of the sale if my image is sold direct from pixmac and any that are sourced from FT and DT are icing on the cake at those agencies. Sales for me are still slow and I'll continue monitoring my pixmac sales - I currently only have 125 images with them so at present the Jury is out.

From the buyers aspect this is great news, a single site that offers coverage of two of the biggest agencies in one place, a taste of macrostock if you want to get something special and the bold move of including a free images tab along side the paid photos I think will work well at attracting new customers and making the 'one stop shop' effect even more complete.

Fotolia Want More Photographers - "Operation Level Ground"

Steve Gibson — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:35:20 +0000

Fotolia have announced the launch of their 'operation level ground' to attract new photographers. The program is open to both existing contributors at other microstock agencies (e.g. quit your istock exclusivity and come join us) and also to photographers who are currently outside of microstock selling their work elsewhere i.e. macrostocki prices.

Instead of starting at the bottom of the fotolia ranking system (an important factor that fotolia uses to calculate commissions based on previous sales history) the 'operation' allows new photographers to immediately jump to a higher level hence earning higher commissions from day one. Existing photographers at microstock agencies have to prove their downloads at another agency and will be credited with the same rank they would have received if those images were sold through fotolia. Photographers from outside of microstock need to prove their income from selling images is at least $15,000, more for higher rankings.

Some existing fotolia contributors are upset by the move, many of them who have also been uploading to istock where they have received more downloads now want to have their rank bumped up. A quote from stockastic on microstockgroup (quite an interesting thread going on there...) summing up some of the sentiment:

Another example of how the 'microstock' industry is being rapidly re-configured into a channel for big shops and established pros.
All you small players who've been dilligentaly chipping away, slowly building a portfolio and looking to the future - guess what, a whole bunch of big guys were just let in the side door and shoved in line in front of you.

For existing microstock photographers who understand the market then this could be the perfect opportunity to quit exclusivity as it eliminates the stumbling block that keeps a lot of photographers exclusive with a single agency: "lower earnings while you go through the process of submitting to another agnecy". We might be likely to see more press releases like this.

Because photographers need to have at least 1000 images in their portfolio we are not going to see huge numbers of amateurs 'jumping the queue'. According to istockcharts there are only just over 1000 photographers at istock with more than 1000 images, so from a microstock point of view the only people likely to move on this are seasoned microstockers who feel trapped by their current exclusivity or for some reason decided to only upload to a single site.

But some traditional photographers might be in for a culture shock, and it's these photographers that I think fotolia is especially interested in. Those who can prove they have had $15,000 in sales won't be testing the water and calculating an RPI for their images using a small sample, it looks like (?) they will have to dive straight in with more than 1000 images which in some cases will be "permanently written off to micro", many macrostock terms I've read prohibit portfolios containing images previously offered at micro prices.

Operation Level Ground Runs until 31 December 09, visit fotolia.com/levelground to apply.

October News Digest

Steve Gibson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:28:41 +0000

Cutcaster updated their list of image needs, thought it 'betta' that their premium collection be called crescendo and hired a new creative director. Cutcaster also announced improvements to their search system, providing good search is more complex than it first appears and is one of the many differentiators between the leading microstocki sites and the many turn-key start-ups.

Picscout released something interestingly vague about expanding their tracking solution into monetization, but at first it did sound somewhat similar to what they already have at picapp.com as there was little detail in the release, a week or so after the release microstockdiaries explained all...

Lookstat published some interesting analysis of aggregated sales results across all their users on their blog, some of it was no surprise / confirmation of what we can already see, but the upward trend in earnings per download is indeed nice to behold.

Crestock launched a their 'freebie images' wordpress plugin to insert watermarked images into blogs free of charge. Images come from crestock contributors who opted-in to the service in return for a 5% increase in royalties on images sold. The plugin can be obtained from freebieimages.com. It's good marketing for all crestock contributors if it attracts new buyers to the site, I'm not certain that it's the best implementation. Unlike similar services (like picapp as mentioned above) the image is downloaded and hosted on the end users blog, leaving them free (against the terms of use of course) to remove the hyperlink and the text credit from the image leaving just the watermark in place, hence defeating the goal to direct customers to crestock via direct clicks and search engine ranking. Something more like the tools tab at dreamstime that provides cut-and-paste code (watermarked and not designed for the same purpose I admit) would afford the agency more control over it's media, and I think would be a lot easier for all to use. Wordpress is popular but certainly not the only blogging platform, keeping the image hosted at the agencies site is a more expensive option but allows better control if that image needs to be removed for any reason, and allows users of any platform or forum to post images. It's an interesting marketing approach, clearly picapp think they can make a viable business from it (with ad support). Fotolia have also been recruiting top bloggers to use their images as part of a marketing campaign, which you can read a case study about. Community opinion about crestock freebieimages on microstockgroup.

I removed albumo from our listings, it seems to have gone to microstock heaven sometime around the end of last month, but as I wasn't uploading to them so I didn't notice the exact date.

More Plugins: Fotolia made it easier for buyers to access stock images directly from within Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 and Word 2007 with a ribbon add-in. news release. More information from fotolia and download the 'ribbon'.

Fotolia must have taken some PR delight in welcoming photographer Jim DeLillo into their fold after he cancelled his istock exclusivity press release.

Dreamstime announced they would be doing some database cleaning. Images over 3 or 4 years old without sales would at the choice of the contributor be either removed, offered for re-keywording or placed into the free section. dreamstime forum.

Shutterstock joined iStock and vivozoom in offering buyers a legal guarantee for images purchased from their site, press release. Shutterstock indemnify users for $10,000 legal expenses.

Measuring My Self Promotion Results

Steve Gibson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:37:06 +0000

Coinciding with iSyndica's announcement of the official launch of their 'promotion service' I thought it was time to share a few preliminary results of my investigation into promotion with 'free stock photos'. Even before I wrote the article microstock photos for free I've had been redistributing some of my images for free on various websites with somewhat inconclusive results.

The following table shows the sites I have uploaded images to, the number of images, image views recorded by those sites and the number of times someone clicked a link to my website. Measurements for the first 4 weeks of September 2009.

Site	Images Uploaded	Approx Monthly Views	Click Through	Image Type + Notes
Flickr.com	901	2000	0	Travel images
Flickr.com	193	No Stats	0	Stock Portfolio
Flickr.com	109	No Stats	0	Personal Images
Stockvault	43	4000	3	Reduced Resolution Stock Images
Webshots	300+	2000	0 *	Travel Photos (* no direct hyperlink makes measurement impossible)
Panoramio	51	Unknown	0	Travel Photos (geo tagged)
Picasa	2000	4000(guesstimate)	0	Travel Photos (linked in description)
Morguefile	18 Free + 22 CCi	1000(guesstimate)	0 *	Sample Stock, (lots of views, no hyperlink makes tracking impossible)
sxc.hu	36	800(guesstimate)	1	Sample stock images (reduced resolution)

Caveats and Notes:

Results of click throughs were collected using web server stats, and in some cases where zero results were seen I confirmed this against google analytics.

The same images were not added to each site (making this a less than fair comparison), some of the sites contained stock images, some contain travel photography and some more creative/abstract work or my personal images.

On almost all of these websites the images are provided in return for a link attribution, traffic generated from these links is difficult to attribute to just one source, but this link-back forms the primary rational for 'giving the images away'; this very important factor is not included in the table.

The results to not show the 'branding impact' generated, even if viewers did not click they probably saw my name or pseudonym, perhaps even the url of my website. Like other forms of advertising these 'sightings' can help you get noticed in ways that are very hard to measure, e.g. the next time that person visits a microstock site they are more likely to notice my name or brand as familiar. Unfortunately for me there are a few photographers called Stephen Gibson, even one sharing the same middle initial... so choose your login / profile name carefully when you are setting up accounts on social media and sharing sites.

In some cases I was able include a non hyperlinked url in the image description, (on sites where I could not include a link in my profile), these are noted and will have skewed results.

Depending on the site, having a link back to your own website / portfolio can be an SEOi thumbs up in a search engine even if you don't see many visitors (this depends on the link having a suitable title and not having a nofollow tag).

Current Conclusion

Well I didn't expect a lot of clicks but I did expect to measure more than four!! I thought at first it was somehow to do with nofollow links not being tracked by stats software, but I can see clicks coming in from comments I've made on blogs so that appears to rule that out. I was hoping for these results to show a little more than this, helping to quantify which sites were more useful, clearly I'm measuring the wrong parameters here!

The above table leaves me with nothing but the question "how do we measure the impact of our branding" it appears not to be by looking at clicks! I'm certain that people have visited some of my sites after seeing images shared on the websites above, but without better measurement these results leave me unable to devote more than an hour or so each month to such 'photo sharing promotional activities'. In the case of flickr I will still contribute as I find it a useful community, but the other sites will have to lay dormant.

Has anyone else seen results from their image uploads that can be directly measured? I'm the first to admit that none of my flickr accounts could be described as popular although they do receive a quite pleasing number of views.

I know that this style of promotion is working to some degree, I have one web domain with no content which receives a steady stream of 'Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email' (i.e. the url was typed or the browser did not disclose the referring page). That domain has never had anything more than a holding page on it - I think that's purely off the back of the fact that the domain matches the username (with .com added) I use on some forums and social network sites.

How is isyndica helping?

If the results above are anything to go by then you can't afford to spend too much time uploading images to sites like flickr and picasa, the new isyndica promotion feature allows you to distribute your photos to more than just the microstock sites you normally use. Currently isyndica supports 5 'promotion channels' including facebook, flickr and picasa, twitpic and yfrog (both twitter image hosts). Images you choose to 'promote' are resized and watermarked with a quite clever 'fine grid' which I'd think to be almost impossible to remove but squint and you can see the photo composition almost unhindered, this along with an 'isyndica stamp'. This watermarking is an important point, the promotion feature is designed to promote not "give away" images, so while related to the results above it's not a direct help.

The promotion feature is free to use for images and costs 2c per video upload. I've only had a quick trial of the promotion with flickr, connecting the service was as simple as logging into flickr and clicking to accept the connection. I'm not quite certain how this can be fitted into my strategy, or quite how these watermarked images will be accepted by viewers on flickr. The twitter possibilities are interesting, and I'd like to see the photographers name or website (perhaps optionally) included in the watermark.

I would remind everyone that although I find flickr a great website there is more to it than just uploading photos and I feel that a lot 'ordinary stock' images will be of little interest to flicker viewers, more on that in 7 reasons your photos should be on flickr.

September News Digest

Steve Gibson — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:13:28 +0000

Theres been plenty going on since my last new round-up, here's a few news stories that caught my eye:

Polylooks, a German photo agency announced (PDF release) the launch of their the UK microstock offering, with the polylooks.co.uk domain name clearly angling for a slice of the UK microstock market while polylooks.com still directs to the German language site. The release states that they already have 35000 UK submitted images along with an "extensive European collection".

Yuri released a sales predictor (arcurs.com/cal) for those who love to crunch the numbers. To be honest I can't see the point in trying to predict monthly sales? Analyse yes, but extrapolate future earnings? The sales analysis in isyndica seems to work pretty well for me at guessing what the end of the month will bring (although it probably does not take into account reduced weekend sales at the end of the month etc. DBtale posted a little bit of analysis on his blog.

Fotolia passed 7 million images (including their vector collection of 300k+).

Lookstat formally announced the launch of their back office services for photographers. For a pay-as-you-go flat-free-per-image they will embed keywords and descriptions, edit and upload your images handling any necessary resubmission of your work. The services is aimed at pro photographers who (perhaps like all of us) would like to spend more time concentrating on shooting and less on uploading.

Lookstat also announced the launch of their Partner API which will allow developers controlled access to lookstat data, and hinted at new analytics features coming soon.

Subscription microstock market leader Shutterstock announced the purchase of bigstockphoto, providing bigstock with a larger advertising budget and allowing shutterstock to take a bigger slice of the pay-as-you-go / individual image sales market. Related post on the bigstock forum.

I've started using twitter to post and comment on smaller microstock news stories as they happen.

iStock Guarantee Comforts Buyers

Steve Gibson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:44:18 +0000

istock announced that as of yesterday it would be legally guaranteeing all sales, blowing the 'unique' offering from vivozoom out of the water. Details of the guarantee on this istockphoto forum post and more discussion on it at microstockdiaries. The legal cover will pay for up to $10,000 in damages and for and additional 100 credits users can purchase up to $250,000 of cover.

When I first read the original release I thought "yeah..." not all that exciting is it, and stuck it in with all the 'end of month news stories'. But then I'm NOT a frequent photo buyer am I. There are plenty of people out there who choose to pay micro prices over finding something free because of the comfort that buying gives them. Draw a parallel with the corporate worlds take up of "paid" open source software - having the support of someone else to point the finger at when things go bad is a nice place to be.

As istock take pains to point out problems arising from the content of their collection are very rare, but just a day after reading the release I read the following post on a local website (well as local as you get here in Queensland) http://www.thedaily.com.au/story/2009/09/16/builder-claims-chriss-home-as-its-own-design. While in this case istockphoto might not be at fault there are a lot of risk averse non-professional buyers in microstock who will find the offer of some protection if the file they buy turns out to contain protected IP very attractive.

Microstock News Roundup

Steve Gibson — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:09:58 +0000

Startup microstocki vivozoom have announced several changes to their site following buyer feedback , new marketing activity, improved search and "vivotweet" their twitter account. Interestingly they plan to announce their image needs to photographers via email and via twitter; currently citing agriculture, vineyards, farmland, animals, crops, harvest fruits and vegetable as subjects in need.

isyndica announced they now allow users to create new account using their settings from one of several third party sources including flickr, google and facebook. isyndica also now supports the distribution of illustrations (vector images) as well as photos and video. You can now also pay for your upload credits with paypal.

Shutterstock announced (press release) the launch of their shuttertweet application which automatically 'tweets' various (banal?) messages about contributors latest approved batches and sales stats.

Dreamstime announced a facebook application and fotolia launched a plugin for the wordpress blogging platform.

Mostphotos announced some server upgrades and that they were still on track with development of their new platform (mostphotos 3.0) details in the mostphotos development blog. A visit to mostphotos will show that the current platform seems excellent at picking attractive looking nature and landscape photos, not necessarily good microstock, this might be one reason my stock photo sales are so low at MP.

Panthermedia announced a new extended license to cater for the needs of corporate buyers, more flexible terms for double the cost of a standard license. New extended subscription options were also announced photographers can choose to opt-out of these extended sales options by 1st September if they want.

In late July Getty officially welcomed the free stock photo site stockxchng (sxci.hu) into the fold by replacing all the stockxpert advertisements on sxc with ads for istockphoto. Getty have controlled sxc since the February takeover of jupiterimages. sxc contributors who have an istockphoto account can include a link to their istock portfolio on scx.hu. Alexa recorded a noticable drop in traffic to stockxpert but only reducing levels to those back in March this year. As most of my sales on stockxpert (SXPi) come from Jupiter unlimited and photos.com so it's hard for me to be exact about any drop in sales since the change but with alexa reporting 30% of SXPs traffic coming from sxc.hu it can't be good news for SXP contributors and their sales.

Clustershot added webdav support to allow easier batch uploads.

Dreamstime Royalty Change makes Exclusivity More Attractive

Steve Gibson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 05:25:59 +0000

Dreamstime have announced a change to their photographer comission structure (dreamstime forum post) following a recent announcement of an increase in credit prices. The new structure leaves commissions for exclusive photographers unchanged at 60% but creates a tiered structure reducing royalties for non-exclusive photographers to 30% for the least popular images. Popular images still receive 50% commission rate. Previously dreamstime paid a flat rate of 50% for all sales of non-exclusive photographer images. Exclusive images from non-exclusive photographers have also taken a bonus royalty cut from 10% to 3-5% over standard depending on sales levels.

This makes dreamstime photographer exclusivity far more attractive than it was, it seems that the previous offer just 20 cents per upload over the royalty of an exclusive image from a non-exclusive photographer was not attracting enough exclusive photographers to dreamstime. With the recent increase in cost of credits some non-exclusive photographers may see improvement in their earnings despite the royalty drop. Dreamstime hinted in their statements that their previous higher than industry average royalties was affecting the amount they could spend on marketing their images.

The new structure still offers one of the best commission rates for photographers who produce high selling images, and the baseline rate of 30% is still above that of several of the other top agencies.

The agency also announced 90% increase in traffic according to third party stats monitoring sites, while that sounds like spin and is not necessarily a reflection of actual sales, even if only partly true it still indicates significant growth for dreamstime.

More discussion about exclusive microstock photos and photographers

Comparison of microstock agencies offering exclusivity

Comparison of commission rates

Premium Collections: Selecting the Very Best of Microstock

Steve Gibson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:13:51 +0000

Cutcaster have announced the launch of their "Betta than Vetta" collection, "Betta than Vetta" is apparently Irish for mountaintop, and is a collection of hand selected images available from the cutcaster stock collection of almost 400,000 items.

It's not the first hand picked collection and certainly not the last. While premium microstock sounds like an oxymoron to some traditionalists, and tongue in cheek or not, I can see that microstock agencies are taking multiple approaches to tackling a common problem: producing good image search results is difficult!

How are the different agencies uncovering their best images?

istockphoto and possibly others track clicks in their search results to match them for relevancy against search terms. Not just frequent downloads with matching keywords are shown in istock results, but images that were popular with people who previously searched for the currently chosen keywords. istock plan to extend this to match against region searched e.g. images often viewed or purchased by Italian buyers will be recorded separately to images popular with buyers based in the states hence creating results more targeted to current trends and national preferences in each region.

Crestock seem to be creating a premium only collection by not selecting anything but the highest quality images. The only sacrifice perhaps being the sanity of contributors (high rejection) and potential perhaps to miss sales of 'unusual subjects' that is created by having a collection of such size that virtually anything can be found if you dig deep enough.

Dreamstime have (I think?) begun to crowdsource the selection process with their stock rank game. Stock Rank records images that buyers and photographers think will sell. It compares unsold and sold images side by side possibly allowing dreamstime to filter low quality compositions and poor marketability from their collection even if those images have made an occasional sale. It seems dreamstime have yet to use this data other than to create a vanity badge for their contributors in the forums and profile pages.

Panthermedia hand pick uploads during the review process and mark them as RECOMMENDATION or EDITORIAL TIP giving them priority in search results.

The Untapped Niches

Hand edited collections or at minimum hand picked 'popular images' or category pages is a great and relatively easy way to improve the feel of quality in a stock collection, but I feel that there is still money left on the table here. I have always thought that using istock lightboxes and similar tools (here is a typical example of eye candy to inspire all but the most cynical photo editor) or using and APIi like fotolia API to create a niche site or search function is something with a lot more potential for growth.

Creating the facility to allow users to do this I feel should at least be on the to-do list for the agencies that have yet to implement it. If course users won't spend their own time sifting images unless it's relatively easy and there is some sort of reward structure in place for doing so, be that via an expensive and potentially risky API or via a relatively simple referral link to their 'public lightbox' and a few search tools for searching within that lightbox.

To make and example, it takes a lot more than just sticking 'food' into a search to find a great collection of food photos. A good quality hand picked 'food' collection would include lifestyle images like picnic's in open fields, people enjoying a bar-b-que with friends in a back garden, fine restaurant dining, children cooking, enjoying wine on a yacht, the list is endless and very few of these would appear if you just tacked on the keyword 'food' and looked at your search results. It's already been demonstrated making good images easy to find is something that people are willing to pay extra for.

Microstock agencies have built themselves huge collections of images, advanced search tools that further optimise search relevancy for popular terms but compared to macro they are still very much lacking when it comes to serving up 'style'. With so many contributors the good images are all there, but are often lost in the 'moraine'.

Like leveraging the 'crowd' who originally created all these images, I feel there is no better way to generate novel ways to sort and sell all this content than by enabling the crowd to do it. There is no doubt that referral marketing works, but it has it's pitfalls, it can adversely affect a brand if not controlled properly and catching up with the big agencies in terms of development cost would be an expensive decision for a growing agency. Making use of anything more than the simple API tools is an impossibly steep learning curve for all but the most 'techie' of microstock contributors, however these are the exactly people who make a lot of this work - just like a successful microstock agency it's a mix of photography AND technology knowledge.

Compare microstock referral programs

iSyndica gets even better

Steve Gibson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:13:31 +0000

isyndica.com have just announced a restructuring of their pricing. I reviewed isyndica a couple of months back and since then I've been using it as part of my normal upload workflow. One of the only gripes I had at the time was the price, but now things have changed.

Update: iSyndica have announced a contest offering the chance to win $200 Apple gift cards

Pricing starting at free!

There is still a free isyndica account which offers 100 free credits per month (an image upload to a chosen agency is one credit, ten credits for a video). You can now buy prepaid credits that never expire for 1 cent each, the minimum purchase being 500 credits for $5.

Prices for paid subscriptions have reduced, now starting at 4.99 per month which gets you 200 credits, again you can buy additional upload credits for 1c each.

Backup storage included

Paid accounts now include the bonus of secure backup storage of your images along with stats/analytics of your sales and custom FTPi upload channels (syndicate to any agency that supports ftp).

If you only want to upload your images to any of the 21 supported image agencies (as of 30 July 09) or 7 supported video agencies then a free account is all you need, paying for additional (more than 100) uploads as you need them.

I always like to highlight both benefits and any negatives of services I review, with iSyndica I have a problem, the iSyndica team keep adding new features to the site. The lack of support for secure ftp / veer marketplace was a minor issue as was my complaint about credits expiring, both have now been fixed. So far I have found the service reliable and a big time saver, I really can't think of anything bad to write.

indepth isyndica review

isyndica.com

more microstock workflow tips and tools

Veer Marketplace - Contributor Images now Available

Steve Gibson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:58:12 +0000

Images uploaded by contributors to the veer marketplace over the past month are now available for purchase along with images that were migrated from snapvillage.

Updates to the contributor area dashboard 'accepted tab' allow photographers to monitor sales and views of their uploads.

Over the past month veer have been working hard in the microstock community forums to iron out any bugs with their upload system.

I currently have 240 accepted images in the market place and will monitor results over the coming months. The marketplace (microstock) images are displayed in a separate panel at the right of the screen when searched for on veer.com even if searches are made via the 'marketplace' tab.

full veer marketplace review

Google's Stock Photo Search?

Steve Gibson — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:42:35 +0000

Google recently announced the launch of some new features in their Google images search tool. Google previously provided a creative commonsi search but not integrated into Google images. The new filter allows users of Google images to search for images licensed for free use under creative commons licenses. Google is not the first to offer a creative commons image search everystockphoto has been doing it for a while (although they only seem to show me results from flickr and sxci).

Is this going to "spell the end of image libraries like iStockPhoto"? I doubt that very much - not everyone wants a creative commons attribution plastered on their website or printed design. From my tests the results are nothing like as correctly matched as those on a stock photo website.

At present the new search filter is buried in "Advanced Image Search" so most Google users won't see it unless they go looking. I'd prefer it if Google showed icons alongside each image to show their probable license status, perhaps defaulting to "copyright / unknown").

I thought I'd put it to the test and see what I could find. My favourite test search "apples":

Wow what a lot of flickr images! Getting a little more advanced made things very 'interesting', a search for "London" reveals that the tuning of this search is not that perfect. Far more concerning is the aerial photo showing third in the results:

There is no evidence I can see that the third result is creative commons in the blog that the result links to, Infact that blog then links to a big picture page of aerial photos on boston.com the photos on which are quite clearly copyrighted. Until more pictorial content on the web is semantically tagged (more about rdf and photography) services like this will remain useful but imperfect, searching for images with text is a difficult thing to do properly. This is not something of concern for people selling to the average stock photo buyer, but more the army of amateurs looking for something free who likely do no fully understand photography licensing.

We'd all like to think that people looking on Google images will read any terms and conditions that are shown with images that are found but sadly some, perhaps quite a lot of them, won't. A lot of bloggers now think it's "fine if you include a link", and while that's better than what people previously did (just to rip it off without attribution) it's no good if you as a photographer want to keep full control over your copyrighted and not cc licensed photos.

Problems aside I have no doubt some enterprising photographers will leverage this feature to their advantage, It's just another step towards 'the internet' filtering photography by popularity. Those with creative commons images on flickr already have a head start. Popularity is one thing but converting that into cash is another, It appears that popular photos on flickr are more likely to be 'noticed' for the Getty collection, but it should also be noted that offering an image as creative commons blows any chance of Getty reselling it for you as rights managedi or you offering it as exclusive microstock

Related Posts:

Preventing Image Theft

SEO For Photographers

Promoting your Stock Image Portfolio

Image Licensing and Creative Commons

Geotagging, Photography and the Semantic Web

admin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:22:05 +0000

As a photographer you have probably come across the term geotagging before now, a way to describe the location a photo was taken in metadata embedded within an image file. This geo tagging can be done in camera (some cameras contain a GPS), with a companion device (a geotagger) that tracks your location as you take photos and synchronises later, or manually with software (just like when you embed titles, descriptions and keywords).

From a stock photography point of view, embedding the location coordinates in this way seems to have had little uptake, even though the technology has been around for some time. There are several reasons for this:

Stock images are often location independent i.e. they don't contain a recognisable location and indeed are not meant to.
None of the microstocki sites seem to use embedded geotag data and few stock photographers choose to embed it (a chicken and egg situation).
Poor photoshop support - if the industry standard has no 'find this on a map' feature then it can't be important?

Consumer Market Uptake

There has been plenty of interest outside of the stock photo industry, or at least use of geotagged information even if people don't know what it is. Online services like panaramio and flickr have allowed users to geographically locate their photos for quite some time; Google maps allows millions of visitors to view images of a location they are looking at in a map or satellite view.

Amateur photographers have adopted this to a minor degree, but this is mostly a way of getting their work more visible, publishing on google earth etc. The main problem at the moment is that it all involves more 'work' unless your camera automatically embeds this information for you.

So is Geotagging important for Stock Photography?

At the moment, perhaps not so. But I think in some respects it will be, and it will be useful for a lot more images than you imagine, way beyond the obvious examples of travel, landscape and editorial stock photography. Imagine being a news editor and being able to search every image on every photo related website taken in the past 24 hours within one block of a pinpointed location of say "downtown Manhattan"? Imagine searching your own computer for images you took on a trip several years ago just by entering the location or clicking a map. At the moment you just can't do a search like that, the information is frequently not there and the search engines provide few tools to access it.

Sure enough some photographers will never need to geotag their work it's just not relevant for studio work, is it? Perhaps it is, perhaps if I wanted to search for a photo of a well known consumer product, and I wanted a photo of only the model that was released to the US market, could I filter on geolocaton? perhaps not 100% reliable, but it is perhaps something that end users might do?

The other important thing about geotagging is that it is semantically different to plot the location a photo was taken as 41°52′55″N 87°37′40″W (which is the city of Chicago, IL) than adding the possibly irrelevant keyword "Chicago" to our image keywords or location field. There is also no possibility of ambiguity between this location and Chicago "a place in South Africa" and worse Chicago "a musical". Imagine trying to search for images of the band Chicago taken in Chicago, don't laugh because I'm sure at some time some poor picture editor has been landed with that job, if they can't find it they can't buy it.

Privacy has been a concern of some people, at present there are some limited ways around this, like setting accuracy so that images are marked as being taken 'near this location'. This allows consumers to narrow down to town and suburb but not street and house.

Here comes the Semantic Web

Okay, so we have just gotten used to Web 2.0 with sites that can aggregate news feeds and blog posts, widgets that display our recent stock image uploads on a blog that other people read on their mobile phone. In a just a few short years people have become accustomed to being able to comment and vote on everything. Net users are able to repost and 'mash' live data that other people produce and share. We can feed our flickr images into a flash application on our facebook page so our friends and family can see our images, even better we can subscribe to dozens of microstock blogs and discussion pages and read them in our feed reader when and where we want. Fantastic isn't it. A few years ago such statements would have seemed "that's for geeks" and to a large proportion of internet users some of this technology still does seem that way, a lot of people are using web 2.0 even if they don't know anything about the underlying technology.

Web 3.0 is about semantic data. It's not about feeding data out and digesting it somewhere else, it's about tagging everything we create in a way that removes ambiguity by context. Then creating the tools to let people do what they like with that data in a natural way. As a photographer you are in some respects already are doing this, you tag a title and description, perhaps a location and you probably also mark your images as copyright or perhaps creative commonsi, but at the moment the technologies for doing this are rather limited. If you have ever cut and paste the code from creativecommons.org then you have already embedded some semantic data about the license that you have given to your image, that code does not just say creative commons with pretty icon, it also invisibly points to a license document that contains all the information.

A format called RDF comes to the rescue here, just one of a suite of semantic web technologies that will shape the future Internet. There is no need for you as a photographer to go away and read that spec now, but the icon below, just like the orange RSS icon is probably going to become a lot more familiar over the next few years...

Web 3.0 is still a few years off yet, it's not going to descend on us over night, it will arrive gradually, websites will add nice features like faceted searches that can optionally mix in and filter by external data on request. Just as we now expect to be able to comment on or get a feed of something we find online we will soon come to expect that things we find like search results can also be mixed with other data we choose. All this without the need for us to worry how it will work because the data will know how to organise itself.

Semantic tagged content must be created and like the chicken and egg situation mentioned above it will be slowed by the fact that at the moment there is no immediate benefit of doing such tagging, compounding this is that software developers will be slow to add such features as standard until a critical mass of users demand them. It will take a while for the technology to standardise, and allow for the creation of end user friendly ways to access it. Take a look at MIT's SIMILE project and their exhibit widget if you want an example that will visually explain what is going on here. People creating semantic tagged content now or at least thinking about it in their planning it will be ahead of the game.

Semantic Web Applications

How will people put this to use? The answers is "in more ways than you can possibly ever imagine". It will be way better than google, or it will be the new google. Yahoo search monkey is already beginning to implement some very basic RDF tagged functionality including images relating to a page, location or individual, developers can then take that data and create applications from it to add extra functionality. Here is a (possibly wild) idea:

I'm an image buyer, I'm writing a story on gold mining in Australia, I need a photo to illustrate my story. Today I would need to go to several stock photography agencies and enter my search terms, in some cases the terms are ambiguous "mine, a weapon" or "mine, underground space" and gold,"a colour" or "a precious metal". If I had an internet full of images suitably tagged with RDF data then I would be able to find every image that was licensed for use as stock or free to use, taken in Australia, larger than the required number of pixels I need for my cover story and matching the keywords gold mine. I could plot that information against the date the photo was taken, the time of day (e.g. night time), or the geographic location. All of this would afford me more fine control to find just the photo I wanted instead of using clumsy hit-and-miss keywords. Doing the same search today would mean stringing together a query like "mine, Australia, gold, historical, daytime" and preying. Oh, and I need that image urgently! right now skype are currently testing their online presence rdf data, mix that in and I can show only the images with authors who are online now, so I can pick up the phone and call them, it will also get me their number so I don't have to go and search for it.

What about keyword spam? won't everything be unregulated? Yes, there will always be sites that contain lots of false or fake information trying to gain traffic to some sort of advertising messages. One of the great advantages of web 3.0 is that it would appear likely that visibility will not be driven by just the tagging content creators perform but also the quality of that tagging and the level of interest it receives. Sources like wikipedia have already produced trusted sources of all kinds of data. In the future I can imagine services providing organised data containing information to direct buyers to images of specific genres, and styles, popular photographers etc. End users will be easily able to filter 'spam' by just removing sources from their filtered results in the same way as spam blockers currently watch what email users mark as spam and delete it so that other users don't have to see messages from the same spammer.

So what's the value to being a stock agency in the web 3.0 future. Plenty, you could provide buyers with a feed of all your images, buyers could mash that data up and filter on only images that are also listed at a stock agency hence guaranteeing some level of quality. Exclusive images will still be of value, as will providing individual photographers with a way of offloading the payment processing and customer support to someone else who can do it better.

Summary

Even if Web3.0 is years off it It seems likely that sooner or later 'the internet' will start delving deeper into our images and their current metadata. Google images currently does not read EXIF datai nor IPTCi descriptions, Flickr can read EXIF but does not allow search by that info apart from images taken with the same type of camera. It's obvious that at some point google, if not someone else using their own sources, will add "map these results by geographic location" "display only images tagged with the IPTC Author : Jane Doe" etc. Right now is a fine time to think about what you tag each of your images with, do you bother to set the clock on your camera to the correct time and date? Do you leave the author and contact fields blank because none of the microstock sites use them? If you can geotag then do it, if you can't then evaluate if it adds any sort of value to the images you take and consider that when buying future hardware and software.

A few years down the line we won't be searching for "Author:Jane Doe", we will have a URI which describes Jane and all her work will be tagged with that (if she wants to share than information). Searching for an individuals pictures on a certain subject will be a lot easier and much less ambiguous, not open to confusion with anyone else who shares the same name. Jane will be able to separate her personal photos from work with a different pseudonym URI

As data becomes better organised then it will become easier to find stock images located anywhere online. Quality photography has always been vital, and quality will become even more important than the agency or website the images are represented by or the marketing done to promote them.

Microstock editorial images

Global Economic Crisis v Microstock

Steve Gibson — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:48:25 +0000

Crisis? What Crisis?

It seems to me that the Global Economic Crisis is not having a huge effect on micro stock. At least that's what I see in my earnings which are relatively stable. There are several factors affecting the microstocki industry at the moment, but at least one of them I think is positive. Although microstock is changing at an increasing pace, it seems to be quite stable compared to the rest of the stock industry which is, at least from the press stories, exploding, crashing and generally turning upside down.

Microstock

Instead of not using stock images at all, I'm guessing that financially constrained buyers are spending on microstock instead of macrostocki, or using more microstock and less macro. Smaller companies and individuals may be forced into using home grown designs instead of hiring professional design, such 'designers' are likely to see microstock as the perfect choice.

None of the stock agencies are likely to just jump up and announce they are in trouble. Over the past few weeks there have been various announcements most of them positive, regarding site upgrades and new purchasing options. Crestock sent out a message saying their servers would have some down time because they were upgrading to accommodate increased sales. Yaymicro announced a 25% increase in sales last month. Cutcaster announced support for corporate accounts.

Stockxpert seems to be the only site at the moment need some love, we'll just have to wait and see what happens there. In recent news (cnet) Bruce Livingston co founder of istockphoto has has stepped down as CEO, but it appears to be for personal reasons and not an indication of any problems there.

Macrostock

Compared to the microstock world, the traditional stock industry appears less buoyant:

Getty recently announced they will lay off 110 (5%) of their employees, with the sales department being hard hit. Jonathan Klein described this as "a result of changes in the imagery business”. Corbis rationalised their workforce last year.

Jupiterimages has fallen from the industry's third biggest player to, well, who knows? It's not all doom and gloom, from what I understand juputerimages had big plans, but the market moved to quickly for them to react. With offices closing and online advertising engines seemingly switched off at jupiterimages since the sale, it seems unclear where photos.com, stockxpert and juputerimages are gliding to...

Alamy's James West sent out a message to contributors opening the debate on a possible subscription model after seeing revenue from newspaper customers drop by 30 to 70 % on last year.

Things in the smaller boutique stock houses seem to be more stable. Is this due to them providing a more personalised service and better suited images?

Future

I have no crystal ball, but I'm certainly planing for microstock to be generating me income well into the future. Spreading earnings across several separate companies is reassuring, some agencies are based in different countries although most are affected by the ups and downs of the US dollar.

I'll close by presenting a link to photopreneur post about Sadik Demiroz, Sadik was the lucky microstocker who uploaded the six millionth image to shutterstock. From a background of professional photography, his comments about microstock being the "direction the industry is moving" rhyme with those that a lot of microstock photographers have felt for some time.

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Steve Gibson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 05:14:04 +0000

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