To mark the new year, I figured it would be a good time to talk a bit about what makes up the entire suite of ‘picNiche’ now, to brag a bit about recent improvements and outline my plans for 2012 with all of this stuff:

What makes up the entire picNiche collection?

• picWorkflow Distribution, Keywording and Microstock Workflow tools for Stock Photographers
• picNiche Microstock Contributors Firefox Toolbar
• Android Microstock Photo Power Search App
• picNiche Microstock Image Search Firefox Toolbar
• picNiche Stock Photo Ideas Engine
• StockPhotoFeeds.com Microstock Portfolio and Search RSS Feeds
• Picz.us Affiliate-Friendly URL Shortener
• WordPress Microstock Search Plugin
• Chrome Microstock Photo Power Search Extension
• Firefox Ultimate Free Stock Photo Search Tool
• Chrome Ultimate Free Stock Photo Search Tool

What happened in 2011?

• picWorkflow:
  • added photo keywording and captioning services
  • made a TON of interface-tweaks, so you can now…
    • Sort your workspace
    • Search your workspace
    • Check for metadata quality
    • Maximise the workspace view
    • Toggle larger thumbnails/previews
    • Set destinations ‘on’ import
    • Buy keywords/captions ‘on’ import
    • Download keyworded/captioned images manually
    • Check metadata quality against agency requirements
    • Copy/paste captions across images
    • Check your images for spelling errors
    • and MANY more
  • Export from lightroom to microstock agencies
  • Use our photo keywording/captioning API
  • Retrieve picNiche-rated highlights for your existing keywords
  • Embed image promotion widgets of all your agency portfolios in your website/blog
  • Agencies can now set themselves as a free-destination for uploads (Depositphotos took our first ever sponsor spot
  • More free distribution in the ‘free usage’ tier AND free distribution for images with purchased keywords
• released the first cross-agency stock photo search mobile app
• presented at StockInRussia and posted my presentation about the mature microstock marketplace on youtube
• presented at Microstock Expo, the microstock expo presentations are all online here
• shared picNiche data into the keyword workflow on Leaf’s excellent microstock keywording tool
• Blog highlights:
  • Microstock 2011 – an Infographic Review all big the events of 2011 in the Microstock industry and a bunch of data I’ve pulled together throughout the year
  • TOP 1000 Stock Photo Buyer’s Searches
  • Do microstock agencies violate photographer’s DMCA copyright?
  • And others

What’s coming in 2012?

• picWorkflow:
  • Model release management will be along in January
  • The picWorkflow retouching service should be along within the first month or two of the year
  • Review service will be added for agencies to reduce reviewing costs (and provide better and more ‘actionable’ feedback for photographers)
  • To improve workflow a LOT… picWorkflow will soon have an agency-api so they can ask picWorkflow for data about an image during submission
  • Free storage (currently 7 days) will be extended significantly (secured backup storage will still be available for additional payment.
  • Pre-review service for photographers so you can have someone else select which images should go where and provide you feedback on improving your portfolio
  • Geo-tagging interface is in-development
  • SEO-friendly portfolio mini-sites will be coming to help increase the search-engine visibility of your images on the microstock agencies.
  • I’m also looking at some social-media stuff, though using it in a non-spammy way is hard as I’d like to release something genuinely useful (not the spambots most microstock sites are doing already).
  • ‘Social’ and promotion distribution (Flickr, Zazzle, etc etc) with watermarking and promo-metadata
  • Shoot management and performance metrics (also toying with the idea of putting a model-user type in there too so your TFD models can download their images directly in web-friendly sizes)
  • I’m also discussing partnering with the excellent Stock Performer to include microstock earnings stats into picWorkflow to really bring together some useful charts and the like for anyone who also uses their tool. (Soooo glad they’ve built it, and in a very innovative way… best possiblity I’ve seen yet for reliable earnings-stats collection)
• picNiche toolbars:
  • I’m spending a LOT of time on picWorkflow at the moment, and haven’t spent much time on the picNiche toolbars in 2011, though with picWorkflow finally becoming ‘usefully profitable’, by march/april I should be able to hire someone (a freelancer at least) to help me do some updates to the toolbars…
  • The picNiche microstock contributor toolbar will be rewritten (mostly from scratch) to update the look-and-feel to match modern browser styling (a lot has changed in the last 4 years)
  • The toolbars will also get a ‘news-like’ panel to easily keep up-to-date with Microstock news and events
  • The microstock contributor toolbar will be ported to Chrome (at least it’s core functions)
  • The picNiche website will get a rebuild (moving from .Net to PHP) and will make some performance tweaks so it runs faster
  • The picNiche research tools will also be better integrated into the picWorkflow keywording UI and a new picWorkflow ‘research’ page.
• Others:
  • The Microstock Powersearch Android app will be ported to iPhone
  • The Free-stock-photo search addons will be improved with more focus on the ‘upsell’
  • The Microstock search apps/addons will get more agencies added, and sponsored ‘default-search’ positions
  • I am talking to a few agencies about vastly improving the submission process from picWorkflow and looking forward to MUCH easier workflow for photographers by the end of the coming year

Well 2011 has been a MASSIVE year for me, for picNiche and picWorkflow… I wish you a fantastic 2012 too! Let me know anything else you’d like to see coming to any of my tools/sites/services and I’ll see what I can do!

Happy New Year!

I have however, dug through the picWorkflow data and come out with some basic charts which give you a rough idea of how long the keywording of a photo (or illustration) should take. My data is clearly in early-days so it’s not particularly statistically significant, but it’s a good indicator (and I will update this post periodically).

Number of Keywording Tasks Completed

This shows the relative number of people choosing to pay at each cost-bracket (between 0.5 cents per keyword and 2 cents per keyword). The long-tail shows most people prefer to pay at-or-near the minimum amount.

Keywording Tasks Duration to Completion

This shows that most keywording tasks (87.4% to be precise) complete within 2 days. 72.9% take 1 day or less. Not bad even if I do say so myself

Keywording Completion Times by the Chosen Payment Cost

The trend here clearly shows that choosing to pay more, leads to a significantly faster turnaround AND a higher keyword-quality satisfication index (I don’t know if satisfication is a word, but heck, that’s what I’m calling it )…

Tips for Faster and Better Quality Image Keywords from picWorkflow Keyworders

1. Pay a little extra, you’ll see the difference.
2. Do you REALLY need 50 keywords on that image of a textured metal sheet or clear blue sky shot?
   • Sometimes keyworders will stop at 35-40 simply because there are no good words left, and none of them wants to be penalised on a rating by adding very generic terms just to make up the numbers.
3. If your image already has all 50 keywords, try having them audited down to 40 or so, you’ll get a better quality keyword set, and subsequently a higher conversion rate in the agency search engines.
4. If your image is of a specific location but exactly where is not obvious from the image, consider adding it either to the title or as the first keyword(s) before tasking for the rest. Keyworders will reference any which are already there when deciding what else should be added.

Any questions or issues, please let me know

Though I’d love to get back to shooting/illustrating more, I know it’s just not feasible at the moment (farrr too busy trying to make picWorkflow awesome! ), so I figured the best thing I could do would be to clean out the lesser-works from my existing portfolio, and distribute only the best of what I have.

The last few weeks I’ve spoken with many photographers (at StockInRussia and MicrostockExpo) about my own (fair-to-middling) portfolio, and figured I had about 2000-2500 images across the 10 main agencies. I expected to cut this by a few hundred, but read on to find out how much

Making the CUT

I’ve had my entire portfolio in Lightroom since their earliest betas (I used to use PS elements) so digging through my portfolio was pretty easy:

1. Clean out those random images we all collect but either I don’t own, or were just ‘sketches’
2. Sort and stack my catalogue (by shoot-time) to filter out absolute duplicates/copies
3. Rename a couple of Lightroom colour-labels (I went with simply ‘Stockable’ and ‘Stock Uploaded’, since I will manage the other statuses in picWorkflow later)
4. I then stepped through all 12,000 or-so images (about half photos, half illustrations/renders) and picked the cream of the crop (Assigned key:9 to set Stockable colour-flag). I expected it to take about 8 hours, but actually took just less than 4 hours…
   Some tips on selection:
   • It was actually pretty handy that I hadn’t looked at a lot of these images in a couple of years. There was no (or very little) ‘emotional’ connection to the images, so I could view them ‘as a buyer’ on their technical and content merits alone
   • I could see the very poor quality of many of my earlier images (particularly my first 40 or so illustrations were awful)
   • If I knew and image had sold at least a handful of times, I favoured it on getting in, even if I wasn’t that keen on the image itself, it was clearly useful to someone.
   • I kept in mind that I will be retitling and re-keywording (the keywords I found on earlier images were mostly useless) most of these images (and retouching some of them too), so if I didn’t think it was worth spending 20 minutes (or 30 cents on picWorkflow keywording purchase) to keyword the image, it would be dropped
   • The image had to look ‘good enough’ in thumbnail view as it did large-scale
   • I had to feel at least a little bit ‘proud’ of the image, and that it makes me feel like it was a successful piece
   • My goal used to be essentially ‘to be accepted by the reviewer’, this was flawed thinking. My goal now is now to ‘upload images which will sell’!
5. After filtering all these, I came out with 479 images which met all my quality criteria, that’s OVER 2000 images dropped, but I’m not worried
   Here’s why…
   • Agency’s search algorithms already favour higher conversion rates (if a searcher views, and then they buy, your ranking improves). This will become even more important in future!
   • As agencies have many millions of images now, the quality of metadata is crucial. Good metadata really does lead to more sales
   • Submission takes time, although I’m adding this to pw soon too, it’s not ready yet, so will be doing this 500 myself
   • Re-captioning and re-keywording all 479 images is not quick, though I will do some myself, even if I sent the whole lot through the picWorkflow keywording service it would still only cost $191 at the most (captions AND keywords), with much of that refunded after the keyword-audits.
   • Not expensive at all, but with my RPI currently around 50-60c a month (indicative of my portfolio quality), still a 1 month investment.
   • With better metadata and higher-quality images, I can expect my RPI to be better on the 6 new agencies I am uploading to.
6. Once the selection was done, I fired up my picWorkflow Lightroom Microstock export plugin and exported them (had to fix the Lightroom keyword export bug first) all to my picWorkflow account (I have only 100kB upstream at home, so took a few hours).
7. Now I have them in picWorkflow I am checking for spelling errors, incomplete or short titles/descriptions, and images with too many or too few keywords. Once I’m happy I’ve given them the once-over, I’ll submit for keywording.
8. I already set them for distribution to my 6 new agencies, and they have good submission phases… with my good quality metadata and only my best images. I’m confident of good sales on most of them

Now over the next 3-6 months, I will watch how well this new smaller portfolio does, then go through the main agencies and start deleting or adding my new replacement metadata to a lot of my non-sellers from there too

What about you?

If you trimmed your stock portfolio today… how many would you cut?
Would you (could you) drop four-fifths of your portfolio too?

Question

Hi Bob,

Have spent the evening researching keywording services and came across yours. Here are my thoughts:

I have [a lot of] images on [agency]… mostly poorly keyworded. [a lot] more awaiting keywords.

1. Question… “if he uses just anyone to do this what about the quality?”
2. Question… “If they use pre designated lists how wrong can they be? Maybe a lot”
3. I’m not in a hurry, and don’t need your upload service … just the keywords on a spreadsheet.
4. You advertise 15 cents somewhere, can we make it $100 per 1000?

My response

On #1, I don’t use ‘just anyone’, all keyworders on picWorkflow are experienced either in keywording their own microstock images (min 1000 images), or keywording the big microstocker’s images. They are quality-checked before acceptance, given specific quality guidelines to follow, and subject to ongoing QA both by me (as admin) and every keywording task can be rated by the keyword purchaser (admin rated after about 2 weeks if purchaser doesn’t rate). About 80% of all keywording tasks are completed by my top 3 keyworders, and all 3 are fluent english speakers. Quality is built into the system as the best keyworders see tasks sooner, so they have the opportunity to work on the best paid tasks.
On captioning, only the best keyworders are eligible to caption and like with keywording are subject to ongoing review.
I have (as yet) received not a single complaint about the service, the only negative feedback I’ve had is that keyworders did not find the scientific name of a plant on a few images (though they usually do pretty well with animals).

On #2, they don’t use predesignated lists, they keyword (and caption) directly from their own minds On top of text-input they are offered related suggestions, which are drawn from a good quality relational database of approx 45,000 keywords or short phrases, and about 350 million relationships.

On #3, You will need to upload the images to picWorkflow so we can generate the appropriate previews for the keyworders to use (anything already partly keyworded will be subject to a lower cost as a keyword audit will only be charged where addition/removal action is needed, the rest is refunded on completion).
Once keywording is complete you can export that via CSV or TSV.
If you’re particularly technically minded, you could also use the photo keywording api which has some extra features (and makes it easier to manage a large portfolio), though you’d need to code your own app/site to consume it and apply the returned data to your images.

On #4, The flexibility on price is entirely your own choice, though you cannot pay less than 0.5c per keyword, to pay $100 per 1000 images, you could choose 20 keywords per image at 0.5c each (ie. 10c per image). Most people choose 30-40 keywords for microstock, though again your average may differ if your images are already partly keyworded (as mentioned above).

Kind Regards
Bob

Very pleased by how well the keywording and captioning people perform

I have been delighted by how good the picWorkflow keyworders are doing for image keyword quality and captions, so I want to thank them again for doing such a great job!

I know a lot of people who read this blog have already given picWorkflow a go (I’ve heard back from a lot of you already, thanks), but if you’ve not tried it yet, why not have a few photos captioned and/or keyworded, it’s inexpensive, it’s excellent quality, relevant metadata, and it saves LOADS of your time

Still have questions? Please comment below or drop me an email

In this 4-part presentation I talk about the shape of the microstock industry now it’s matured, how to develop your portfolio to stay competitive and even to improve sales, some topics to shoot (harvested from picNiche data) and my view on how the microstock industry (and stock photography in general) is developing in future.

It’s a full 90 minutes so you might want to take a bio-break, make a coffee and a cheese sandwich before you start

Do you agree? disagree? Why?

I plan to have more tutorial videos and guides coming soon too, so if you want to keep upto date, subscribe to the picWorkflow/picNiche You Tube channel.

Do you hate taking the time to fill out your title and description fields for microstock submissions??? I know I do!

I’m delighted to announce that you can now have your photo and illustration title and description fields expertly filled out on picWorkflow for just 20 US cents! All titles and descriptions are validated for length and number of words for submission to all major microstock agencies (and if you know an agency limitation we don’t, we’ll add it).

This makes it not-only quicker for you to submit by saving you the title-ing time, but also makes sure your metadata is suitable without having to edit during submission, and since all captions are created by fluent english speakers (most of whom are already experienced in describing photos and illustrations for some of the biggest microstock photographers) you can be sure of high quality, relevant metadata to help boost your visibility in agency search.

With captioning from 20c AND keywording at any price you choose, it’s never been more cost-effective to entrust your photo metadata-creation to experienced picWorkflow operators.

Head over to picWorkflow today, and give it a shot, you will not be disappointed

STOCKinRUSSIA – Moscow – (30 Sept-01 Oct, 2011)

STOCKinRUSSIA has an excellent programme of photographers and microstock experts sharing valuable information on Copyright, Hardware, The History of Microstock, Stock Footage and Developing your microstock workflow. There’s a great lineup of presenters, including a workshop from Andres Rodriguez on making the most with limited resources.

My Presentation

I’ll be talking about Maximising your Earning Potential in a Mature Microstock Marketplace and will focus on these topics:

• I’ll run through the microstock world when viewed from the ‘raw data’ perspective, showing you what I’ve learned about how microstock works over the last few years, and looking into the future.
• I’ll talk about how you can best develop your microstock portfolio and methods/techniques to stay ahead of the competition and expand your sales.
• I’m showing various photography-subjects from picNiche (ups and downs) and I’m explaining how to research and review your own portfolio for maximum market reach.
• I’ll look at workflow, and how to optimise your image-production.
• I’m presenting the ‘raw’ and rational view on how microstock is changing now, and over the next 5 years.

MicrostockExpo – Berlin – (5-6 November, 2011)

Microstock Expo has an awesome programme laid out and is offering something for everyone, from discussion panels looking at distribution, workflow and the microstocker’s lifestyle, to workshops, events and parties too!

I’m really excited to see MicrostockExpo come around, I’ve been disappointed by the lack of microstock content at most of the established stock conferences, and I’m delighted to be speaking on the workflow panel:

The Microstock Workflow Panel

The workflow panel will explore different workflow methods, from post-processing, keywording, through to distribution, including submission…

We (myself, Jean-Marie Guyon of CandyBox, Jazz Mandair of JaincoTech, Rahul Pathak of Lookstat) will explore different options for each step of microstock workflow, to suit different lifestyles and different production rates, as well as different content. Whether you work alone or in a big team, do everything or outsource everything, produce a handful or a truckload, you’ll walk away with some useful enhancements to your workflow.

Don’t miss out!

What ever you’re doing when these conferences are on… cancel it! Go to Moscow and Berlin instead
These will be awesome

There’s more to come, but already the stats tools can be used to improve your portfolio metadata, to distribute your images to more agencies, and to find out where your images may have problems and how to solve them.

Agency Distribution Statistics

You can now use picWorkflow to track your portfolio growth at 10 agencies (more coming online soon) with handy charts for each agency. It also already imports your agency images in the backend and I will soon be adding the tools to the interface soon to automatically detect accepted images and flag up images which you may not have uploaded to some of your agencies so you can easily distribute your portfolio for maximum sales across all your configured agencies.

Automated picNiche Analytics for your stock portfolio

The stats page includes a section to review picNiche analytics data for all keywords found in your portfolios (both on picWorkflow and on agency sites) to figure out where the best opportunities are for more image-sales and for better promotion via SEO. This includes finding the most-searched keywords in your portfolio.

It will also flag up any potential spelling errors or typos on your discovered images to help you find any images which could be performing better and make suggestions to get your images in front of more (and more relevant) image buyers.

Other awesome additions

The free distribution tier has been increased to free 100 uploads per month for all accounts.

I’ve also added a TON of other tools to help you manage your images better, to distribute them, and to ensure your metadata is getting your images in front of more relevant buyers.

• The portfolio browser for metadata and distribution is now searchable by title/keywords
• The browser can be maximised to use all your screenspace
• Image thumbnail sizes onscreen can be toggle for better viewing
• The import page lets you set (and remembers) your default agencies for an entire batch
• You can order keywording right ON import of a batch
• Metagroups have been added to show images ‘not’ yet ready for submission
• The title & description field length/words are validated for your agencies
• A new picWorkflow homepage
• The structure of the site is clearer: Import – Workspace – Distribute
• The import page shows matched/paired files (JPG+EPS/etc) before import
• And countless other improvements!

What else is coming soon?

These tools are coming soon, working feverishly on getting them ready

• Stats phase 2 is coming along soon for earnings tracking
• Your own cross-agency searchable microstock portfolio website
• Automated submissions on some agencies is in the works
• ‘Image matching’ management interface to help clear up agency duplicates and/or similars
• Some extensions to free storage
• Image captioning from 15c
• The free picWorkflow and photoshop-for-microstockers video learning-center

What are you waiting for? To get all this awesomeness…

Go and signup at picWorkflow »

Although I would have liked this post to have been the ‘last word’ on this topic, that doesn’t appear to exist, and until someone really tests these matters in a court of law, I don’t think we’ll ever have the last word. In the meantime, here’s my journey

This is quite a long and detailed post before I get to the conclusion, and most of it is very important to photographers, so before we get into the nitty-gritties; here’s the two-cent tour:

Microstock agencies (perhaps traditional stock agencies too) might be violating the rights of photographers (granted by the DMCA in the USA and InfoSoc Directive in Europe) by knowingly stripping their copyright metadata from images when selling them to their clients. These violations ‘could potentially’ land violating agencies with large fines for each and every infringment (i.e. every single sale they have ever made).

Before I get into this any deeper, and because I REALLY do not want anyone to try and sue me for misrepresentation, slander/defamation, or anything else (as has been suggested they might)… a VERY important disclaimer:

The basis in law to indicate infringement:

There are two main legal documents we are looking at here;

Firstly, the InfoSoc Directive (European Directive 2001/29/EC)

It has been known for some time this law prohibit the removal of any Copyright metadata (including both watermarks and embedded IPTC/Exif/Xmp/other metadata) from any digital media. This has however been largely ignored because in Europe, member nations are required to pass their own national laws to uphold and penalise for the violation of European directives. The EC is prosecuting some nations for not implementing this directive, but the dust has not settled yet.

Despite this lack of penalties in many member states, the directive stands as european law. The relevant clause (Article 7) reads:

You can read the full text here. It is of course dry legal speak, but it’s very clear that the removal of ANY data provided by the rightholders to identify the work is illegal. Since many European nations have no penalties for violation of this act, the agencies have (as far as I can tell) universally ignored this directive.

Secondly, the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act):

From wikipedia: [the DMCA] criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.

The DMCA is almost universally recognised online, and many agencies are familiar with DMCA takedown requests (it was the addition of an automated platform for handling them released by Dreamstime that put me onto research these laws further).

The relevant clause in the DMCA (Section 1202(b)) reads:

Read the full text (pdf) here. In the DMCA it is made even more clear than in InfoSoc, that to intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information, or to use/distribute any digital work knowing copyright management information has been removed is breaking the law.

What constitutes copyright metadata information (CMI)?

This is a little unclear in it’s specifics in both InfoSoc and the DMCA. The bare minimum covered includes the specific copyright fields in all of Exif, IPTC AND Xmp formats. Also protected is certainly the artist, author and by-line fields of all 3 formats. More questionable is whether title, description and keywords fields are required to be retained. Title is commonly regarded as required with extended description and keywords fields (in any format) being more flexible. The makernotes and other ‘satellite’ data such as GPS or editing software flags are probably disregardable.

How might microstock agencies be violating these laws?

I’ve run tests on downloaded images from several microstock agencies and found none to contain ANY copyright metadata. Some retain title/description and keyword metadata in either Exif, IPTC or Xmp/rdf formats, and almost all still contain makernotes (the metadata embedded by the camera such as focal depth, shutter speed, etc).

Given my limited samples (at most 50 images from each agency due to limited funds/access) I wouldn’t normally expect that it be so unusual to have no copyright metadata fields filled, as it’s commonly believed that many photographers do not write copyright metadata to their images.

So I checked picWorkflow import stats and found that around 60% of images (by about 35% of uploaders) have copyright metadata filled at time of import (those which do not are automatically populated with their owner’s most commonly-used copyright metadata so 100% of images exported by picWorkflow have copyright metadata). This is enough for me to infer that somewhere between a quarter and a half of randomly selected and tested images should contain metadata.

The type of metadata remaining in some files also makes it clear that data was ‘intentionally’ stripped at worst (by software or code-libraries intended to manipulate image metadata) and ‘knowingly’ stripped at best (through poor-quality resize software or code-libraries).

This is also backed up by a complete lack of metadata on image thumbnails and previews at agency sites. There is however technical reasoning for this, and some provisions are granted for this in the DMCA and InfoSoc as these are agency-watermarked and often use a unique filename or display an image ID which can be used to trace the file to it’s owner. Providing they are not transmitted to third-parties for any use other than caching for performance/traffic reasons. This suggests for the most-part that the same process used to resize their photographer’s images is knowingly stripping metadata (The violation being in the for-client-download output).

I’ve also read through the terms and conditions and contributor contracts (where they could be obtained) of the agencies mentioned below and despite occasionally references to granting them the right to store and distribute photographers images, or to resize them and convert into alternate formats. There is no mention I could find of stock photographers granting agencies the right to remove copyright metadata. The response from Nancy Wolff (below) suggests the contracts may cover such removals but I’m not sure I agree that sweeping ‘modification’ statements would be applicable with regard to metadata for which specific conditions exist in law.

What about traditional agencies, are they safe?

I don’t have hundreds of dollars to purchase and test traditional agencies sold-files. If you have purchased any, please open them in photoshop or other software capable of viewing image metadata (I used Opanda’s IExif which reads Exif, IPTC and Xmp for my tests) and review their contents. I’d like to find out more here.

Could Microstock agencies be fined for such violations?

I first found the mention of fines for copyright metadata removal here, and since most legal penalties are per-infringment, I took a look into the details written in the DMCA and found (Section 1203(c)) does indeed state:

Which seems to indicate that any photographer who found their work to have been distributed to image-buyers without the copyright metadata which was applied to their image when it was uploaded to the agency, would be entirely within their rights to demand payment (of how much I am not qualified to state, but the upper limit is $25,000).

I also can’t say whether each sale (distribution without metadata), or each image (import/storage without metadata) would take precedence, I guess that would be upto the lawyers and judges involved to decide, but there have been many cases successfully prosecuted for both examples under the DMCA. In the ‘best’ case (for the agencies), paying even modest damages to a large number of photographers would indeed be a huge burden for any microstock agency to bear.

It’s been highly unlikely to happen so far solely because of most microstock photographer’s lack of knowledge on copyright (due to the immature marketplace) and the lack of interest for those top-level photographers (who are knowledgeable) to harm their agencies, but there ‘might’ be grounds for photographers to raise cases for damages in future.

Which microstock agencies might be violating these laws?

Every agency I’ve tested so far appears to some extent to strip (or fail to preserve) metadata.

To be clear, my investigations are limited to less than 15 puchases for each agency, and a bunch of google-image searches to find web-use images online other people have purchased (about 10-25 per agency), so these observations are not accusations, or proof, but do warrant extra investigation, and I’ve asked the agencies mentioned to provide their responses to these observations:

I’ve tried to test a sample of agencies across the microstock ‘spectrum’ to get some idea of the overrall picture (I also tested Cutcaster images, but with a very small sample-set so dropped them from above).

If I missed something, or if there’s an agency you’d like me to specifically check out. Leave a comment at the end and I’ll add them too.

Why wouldn’t microstock agencies include copyright metadata in the sold images?

There are two main reasons as I see it. One is technical, until a couple of years ago managing metadata on image files was very difficult on the backend-server. With IPTC, Exif AND Xmp metadata all doing the rounds, and requiring different libraries, common image resizing libraries in many languages and platforms, both free/open-source and commercial were very limited in what they could do, and extra libraries to specifically manage metadata were spotty-at-best.

Recently this has improved slightly with various backoffice suites for image-management, and libraries released by php developers, adobe and various other groups to make handling image metadata more reliable and consistent. The technical reason no-longer stands.

The second reason (though purely speculative) is simple business. If your customers can cut you out the middle and go direct to your photographers, then what is the agency there for? This simple reasoning may have meant that for new/growing agencies it was initially risky to share copyright/ownership with clients who might go direct to the source.

I’m not sure this is as much a risk anymore either, since in the maturing marketplace image-buyers are comfortable with their agencies and the remaining risk is in buyers searching for photographer’s image on other ‘cheaper’ agencies.

Why is this important NOW more than ever?

As a photographer myself, and as a business-owner with an interest in representing photographer’s interests, I am seeing more and more violations of our copyrights. Just whilst researching and writing this post I identified around 100 images stolen from agencies and used either outside of the license terms, or without any valid license at all (people using watermarked images is much more common than I realised).

With the increasing use of tools like PicScout, Tineye, and the amazing functionality of the new Google image search making finding duplicate images easier than ever before, my concern is that image-theft is becoming ever easier.

In addition to theft, with orphaned-work laws in the works all over the world, there are already millions of purchased images in use online with NO ownership metadata. Orphaned works laws will make the use of these works commonplace due to the ability of future-users to say “no copyright metadata, it must be free” and to get away with it scot-free even if photographers make follow-up claims after the use is discovered.

Without a proper and clear definition of photographer’s copyrights being retained for the entire life of the work, the cost to all photographers is significant.

What should agencies do about this problem?

Firstly, agencies MUST retain any copyright metadata in images which are uploaded with it embedded. This metadata must be transferred to any-size version of the image sold. Without doing this, agencies ARE (in my opinion) breaking the law.

So they are not caught in the ‘enabling others to violate’ clauses of the DMCA, agencies should also include in their client’s license terms that it violates the DMCA to knowingly remove copyright metadata from the source image. This is a little foggy when the client is dealing with derivative works. I’ll have to research that more.

Where images are uploaded to the agency without copyright metadata embedded, it is my recommendation that agencies ‘should’ embed at least basic information in the form “© year artistname – agencyname”. This would not only ensure the copyright is correctly attributed but also that image-buyers can find the creator of images they have purchased, if only on that own agency’s website.

What do I want from agencies in response?

Agencies will hopefully respond to this post by declaring their position on metadata-retention under DMCA either to me, or on their own blogs/forums. I will post any links I find or am sent by the agencies onto this post.

For those agencies mentioned above, it would be good to hear a firm committment from them on modifying their systems to retain all relevant metadata on purchased files. They should also mention a timeline for any changes to their systems to be implemented.

Ideally it would be great if agencies also commit to embedding copyright metadata where the artist omits it, but is of course not required by the law, so additional praise will go to those who do so

And what do the agencies have to say about it?

Responses are colour-coded for no response, stated their policy is not to strip metadata, committed to embedding copyright metadata where possible, and where it does not exist already.

In addition to comments made above, I received an additional and thorough response from Dreamstime’s CFO. I’ve included it in full because he makes several very important points throughout.

The short answer to your headline question (Do microstock agencies violate photographer’s DMCA copyright?) is respectfully, notwithstanding your assertions to the contrary, a categorical “No.”

We at Dreamstime are proud to be part of an industry that provides an efficient and legal online marketplace for stock photo licensors and licensees. In general, our industry is fully compliant with the letter and spirit of both the EU INFOSEC Directive and the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the “DMCA”).

In your post, you quote the following very important provision from the Section 1202 of the DMCA:
[quoted my text from above]
But you do not quote the following key language that appears at the end of subsection b: knowing, or, with respect to civil remedies under section 1203, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any right under this title.

The underlined language above, which is not quoted or discussed in your post, is of crucial importance in determining if a microstock agency legally operates within the protections of the DMCA and INFOSEC. Without including the underlined portion of Section 1202(b) in your analysis of the DMCA, one might conclude that removal of meta data, under any circumstances, in an infringement of the photographer’s rights. However, such a reading of the DMCA is not consistent with the law. As noted by a recent decision from a federal district court in California reviewing this very issue, in order for there to be a violation of Section 1202(b)(1), a defendant must have (1) without authority of the copyright owner or the law, (2) intentionally removed or altered copyright management information (“CMI”), (3) knowing or having reasonable grounds to know that the removal will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of the federal copyright laws. The manner in which legitimate microstock companies conduct their business is specifically outside this provision of the DMCA.

As you are of course aware, microstock agencies take the role of broker in transactions between photographers interested in selling certain rights in their works of authorship and willing purchasers who receive permission to make approved uses of those works. In this relationship, the microstock agency’s role is not unlike that of an art dealer. The agency doesn’t claim to the author, nor does the agency claim to own the work of art, but merely facilitates its purchase and keeps a small percentage of the sale price for its services. Because of the nature of the transaction, all participants (and nonparticipants for that matter) acknowledge that the microstock agency is not responsible for acts taken by the photographer or the purchaser.

As you know internet-based microstock agencies provide, as their primary distribution channel, a website where willing purchasers can browse photos that are available for license. Most, if not all, of these websites have been developed and customized – for the convenience of photographers who are voluntary members of the contributor community – to permit a photographer’s submission of new photos through the websites. Often this submission process includes a number of automated tasks, which are (again) provided for the convenience of the photographer. With only a few clicks of the mouse, one is able to submit his or her photo for licensing, and that photo may be cropped, resized, and watermarked, among other transmutations, each of which are generally required to install that photo into the catalog of available photos presented to a browsing purchaser. By clicking that “Submit” button, the licensing photographers are executing all of those transmutations themselves. Dreamstime, like most microstock companies, does not initiate and is not responsible for those actions; it merely provides the facility for quickly performing them, without the need for repetitive and time-consuming conversions on the user’s end before upload.

In the case of Dreamstime, specifically, every contributing photographer acknowledges and agrees that we are not the parties performing any conversion tasks that take place during submission. In particular, we direct your attention to a particular acknowledgement in our terms:

“Any modification of Images uploaded by Dreamstime’s users, such as the addition of a Dreamstime watermark, is performed by an automated process. Accordingly, as the Contributor is aware that such modifications shall take place automatically upon upload, the Contributor shall be deemed the party responsible for such automatic modification and shall be considered the ‘author’ of such automatically modified Image. Dreamstime is not responsible for modifications that occur to Images as part of its automatic posting process.”

Therefore, with respect to Dreamstime’s contributing photographers, as well as in the case of other similarly operating services, to the extent that any meta data is removed from an image submitted using an automated process, that removal is done at the direction of, and therefore with the permission and authority of, the contributing photographer.

Since the rights holder in this situation gives consent to meta data removal, that is really the last word on the question of whether there is a violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. Moreover, the simple fact is that the bulk of our contributors do not populate any copyright meta data fields at all in the images that are originally submitted. An anecdotal survey of the top 15 Dreamstime contributors reveals that only 6 submit images with meta data containing copyright information, 3 of whom have the EXIF copyright fields filled in only, 2 who have both copyright information in both the EXIF and IPTC fields, and 1 using only IPTC copyright data fields. Even if we were to modify our current submission process to preserve meta data, which by the way would cause our data storage requirements to substantially increase and significantly slow down our website for browsing licensees, it would make little sense to transfer IPTC data (i.e., the place where you store copyright info in your own images) to every version of each submitted image, as the vast majority of contributors do not use the Adobe software that would populate the IPTC fields. IPTC data has limited usefulness, in any case, as it not easily accessible through a simple right-click or other operation. Although EXIF data is more accessible and user friendly, it still presents the same size and bandwidth problems, as it is not possible to just keep the fields associated with copyright information.

We respectfully suggest that, given the limited number of contributors who include copyright information in the meta data attached to their photos, and given the economic and technical challenges associated with the implementation of changes you recommend, that any changes to the manner that the industry operates should obviously be balanced with the very important consideration of what, if any, fee increases that microstock agencies would be required to charge for their services as modified. This consideration is crucial, lest the cure be more harmful than the ailment.

While we can’t make every improvement that everyone recommends, Dreamstime and the rest of the microstock industry generally value and respond to meaningful suggestions from our user community, and in partial response to your comments, we certainly intend to continue consideration of the cost-benefits associated with potential future revisions to our platform, including the possible implementation of functionalities that would address your concerns in some fashion.

In addition, we have revised our terms, without any suggestion that a revision was necessary, to emphasize the automated revisions that contributors are performing by submitting their photos through our platform, specifically highlighting that such processes currently include the removal of meta data.

Edit 10-Oct-11: Dreamstime have just let me know that they have now modified their system to embed copyright metadata in every single purchased image, and are currently in the process of applying the metadata content to thumbnails/previews too. This is really good to see

I’m also hugely grateful to have received a thorough response from Nancy Wolff, (legal counsel to PACA). Nancy is highly knowledgable and respected in stock photography. She says:

I sent the following questions:

And Nancy kindly responded with the following:

I’m not 100% convinced by her argument, since PACA represents agencies rather than photographers (and I’m somewhat of a cynic), but she makes a compelling case AND is infinitely more experienced than me in such matters, I can’t refute them with much (if any) authority.

Both detailed responses (from Dreamstime and Nancy) seem to make the case that agencies ‘may’ well remove copyright metadata, and by doing so are NOT violating the DMCA (though no direct commentary on violation of InfoSoc, but understandably so).

If you know any lawyers who directly represent photographer’s interests, please pass this post onto them for their input.

So… do agencies violate photographer’s DMCA copyright?

I do not know for sure… but it does not appear so..

When I started writing this post, I was pretty certain that they were. Though with my small sample sets AND Nancy’s input, I’m not so sure anymore.

Some certainly DO strip metadata, though which parts are being stripped legally or illegally has become even murkier than before. This might just have to be one of those things I wait out and see if agency’s competitive natures will lead them to become more ‘moral’ on the matter, without having to rely on the law to enforce such ‘positive’ behaviour.

I’m hugely grateful to those agencies (Dreamstime, Pixmac and Deposit Photos so far) who have already committed to preserving and even expanding photographer’s copyright metadata in response to this post and I’m hopeful to hear from those agencies who have yet to voice their policies.

Maybe by working together we can help prevent millions of photographer’s stock images falling down the back of the sofa and being hoovered up by orphaned-works laws

As a stock photographer, what can you do about it?

1) Always include copyright metadata in your image, illustration AND footage files. Images are very easy to apply metadata to in Photoshop, Lightroom, or pretty-much every other image editing suite in existence. Illustration files (.ai and .eps) also have good provision for metadata, though footage file formats are a little different, .mov and .mp4 wrappers have good support.

2) Submit only to agencies who read image metadata from your files, and get into the habit of checking your metadata before and after import to your agencies. Fotolia for example make this easy to check, as each image a contributor uploads has a details page showing all metadata they could read. Other agencies don’t do this as well, and I’d like to see more of this type of contributor’s tool.

3) Be militant about your rights. Your images are YOUR work and you are granting agencies the right to sell them for their cut of the income. IF an agency violates your rights, be sure to call them out on it. It’s likely they’ve done the same to more people, and together you stand a much better chance of finding a reasonable outcome.

What do you think?