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The model of Albumo is a bit different from traditional Stock sites. It is designed to buy and sell pictures (like everywhere else) but also to host and share pictures (like flickr, Zooomr….) in fact it is the opposite of Zooomr, which is a sharing platform where selling is a possibility. Albumo is a Microstock where sharing is a possibility. 5GB hosting accounts are free and upgradable up to 30GB (for 30 credits). It might be interesting to see if there are synergies from those two offers. It is to early to say since the platform is not finalised and community still limited.
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By completing a thorough analysis we are now positioned to launch with a more imaginative, innovative offering, and a website that is simpler, easier to use and in the end more appealing than anything else in the market place.
They position themselves differently. Price model is different and therefore it can be assumed that they did not wanted to buy at a very high price a market that was not the one they want to develop. Then on technical side, they are very criticised by competition for their instability (the site is still in Beta), but it is also understandable that they have different views
Building our website ourselves has also given us the opportunity to control the user experience, the design of the website and the technology.
However building a website and a community takes time. No date is published yet for the end of beta phase, 2008? 2010? There were many other opportunities. This Snap Village seems to be a small experience (snap shot pictures and small village community) compared to the size of the world to come.
And now Dan Heller suggests Getty should move towards web visibility: buying Flickr to Yahoo.
]]>RSS feeds are quite good to keep informed with updates on sites, blogs and podcasts. It can be useful to monitor pictures posted too. For Instance you can monitor all pictures tagged smile on flickr or on Fotolia or any other tag or photographer that you like and want to monitor.
You can read those feeds with your favourite feed reader. I use Netvibes but many other are great too. They can also be read from cell phone. Problem is you soon end with hundreds of RSS feeds and it is more difficult to share with other people or to switch from one reader/device to an other. Here XFruits can help: it combines your RSS feeds selection into one single one.
Paul Melcher, made a pretty good mix and I just notice I am part of it. 
It is available here: Photo industry News.
Don’t hesitate to subscribe to this feed if you are interested in that subject. (ie: Just copy the address of the feed into your feed reader and that is it).
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Give pictures the thousand words they worth. Dreamstime wants your ideas and thoughts whether you are photographer, designer or regular user. Tread into the Dreamstime blog area to blog your story while promoting favorite images and favorite photographers.
Since the tool is quite easy to use and it is even possible to post from email, it should be widely adopted and it might lead to interesting results.
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Because they are the antithesis of their Fair Trade Photography credo. But what is really fair when the whole industry is moving, when technologies are changing, when habits are different, when photography is abundant? What is fair and unfair? It is really difficult to judge. Fair trade is a concept that has been developed for mainly for raw products produced in third world countries, it has been extended to handcraft, and has now applications in western countries. But Fair Trade for digital copies of music, books, pictures… is more complex. Fair to whom? You can make as many copies as you want, it won’t cost a dime! Is it fair to price huge amount of money when it doesn’t cost you that much to produce billions of copy? Should be artificial scarcity encourage in a world of abundance?
On the other hand photographers need money, and selling for a few cents doesn’t make a living. Raising prices is possible since competition won’t be that much on price than on services and search quality. With Photographer direct buying a picture can take a few days, or even more if the photographer is not available. Quality of services is the most important since quality of photography progressively reaches every stock.
Though they raise a point that should not be ignored: in many cases 1 dollar photographies could have been sold at a higher price and that is lost for photographers. But the fair trade of the digital economy is still to come, and it won’t be exactly the same as the fair trade of brick and mortar economy.
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Fotolia offers an API pack so that everyone can easily create an online virtual microstock shop. The search interface can be personalized with a nice design, and webmasters can earn money through the affiliation system, and user can have their own search engine that fits their needs. I tested the pack on Fotolearn and it is really easy.
The design of the pack has been developed by WEB-E-TIC , and it seems they did quite a good job at it.
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Photographs selling their pictures on Micro Stock websites always have to cope with a cumbersome task: tagging their pictures and uplaoding them. The easier way si to use softwares like Photoshop to tag pictures and an ftp manager to upload them. But it still remains the boring part of the job. Creation is fun administration is not. Moreover moderation is sometimes erratic and a good picture that would sell might get rejected and the tagging and uploading time might just be a waste of time.
One software can rationalize those operations:prostock master. It manages very easily tagging and uploading on major microstock sites (8 of them so far). And because it uses Java it is Multi platform.
I wonder what will be the consequences if this kind of software get massively used. The market might be reshaped. Anyway this high growth market might still surprise us in many ways…
This blog will be in both english and french.
Wikipedia defines Micro stock as stock photography services that sell images with three main characteristics:
Top micro stock sites include:
istockphoto
Shutterstock
Dreamstime
BigstockPhoto
Fotolia
Canstockphoto
LuckyOliver
123RF
This site is referenced in the wordpress directory.
