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Some people complain that10 million photos are too many. Now, spffy.com gives you access to 1 billion pieces of visual content.
The site is a trademark and service of StockPhotoFinder.com, a New York-based stock-photo search engine. Currently, it houses still images from Getty Images, Corbis, StockPhotoFinder and Fotolia on the site, with Jupiterimages and Superstock listed as coming soon. It also offers Flickr and Yahoo under its Web Photos category and the Library of Congress and NASA under Public Domain. For video and footage, spffy searches YouTube, AOL Video, Live Video, StockMotionFinder and others. Expect many additional brands to be added in the near future.
When a customer is interested in using an image, Spffy links directly to the rights holder or authorized agent for each content. Pricing, licensing and download are available for most content on preview pages. Depending on the collection, the rights to use an image and the fees for such usage vary greatly. This direct contact also facilitates information exchange, from price negotiations for complex commercial uses to verification of rights and release information.
While the vision is to offer a wide ranging and comprehensive collection of brands, each is searched independently. There is no global search across all brands. An advantage for customers is that they can put images from a variety of brands into a single lightbox. Web designers can also share lightboxes with co-designers in the creative process through spffy's RSS feeds.
A huge percentage of the billion images are on Flickr and Yahoo. With those image,s it can often be difficult to find how to contact the copyright holder or what rights the customer has to use the image.
"From our starting point of searching 1 billion pieces of visual content, spffy is adding the mashups, business models and content sources that creative communities need in a single site," says co-founder Randy Taylor. "The hottest new creators design for online use. Spffy solves their biggest problem by making it easy to find visuals that can be licensed instead of wasting time hunting all over the Web."