Search
I want to call your attention to a couple of comments to my recent story “
Curated Collections: The Future.” It is important to recognize that there are some great images on most of the stock photo sites with tens of millions of images. But as we shove everything that meets certain technical standards onto these sites, it becomes harder and harder to sort through all the mediocre shots and find the few great ones.
Dreamstime has made changes to its Extended License policy allowing users to produce unlimited copies of purchased media. Previously, customers purchased extended licenses for print or web usage of an image and were restricted by limits on the number of copies they could reproduce, for example for t-shirts, on-demand printed items, or e-cards.
If you’re a Getty contributor and your sales and revenue have been declining, it may be time to do some searches on Gettyimages.com as a customer would search. Input some of the generic keywords that a customer might use to find your images. See where your images fall in the search return order.
Many photographers who used to earn hundreds, and even thousands, of dollars for the use of one of their images think Shutterstock, and Microstock in general, are killing the stock photo business. Some Shutterstock contributors are even beginning to ask the same question. A reader recently asked for my analysis of why Shutterstock’s continued addition to its collection of over 700,000 new images a week won’t “drown it’s customers and risk losing its best contributors.”
Recently, I found a list on Pond5 of popular keywords customers use to find videos. Earlier this month I published a similar
list that Videoblocks had sent to its contributors a few months ago. I decided to search
Pond5,
Videoblocks and
Shutterstock for each of these words and record the number of returns. You’ll find the results in the chart below.
More images are not the answer. The industry needs to find a better way to present the images already in databases for customer consideration. Customers find it harder and harder to dig out the right image for their needs from todays large databases. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the right images aren’t there. It’s just that customers do not have time to search through all the available options.
One of the keys to success in stock photography is understanding what customers want. Given that the worldwide customer base is so diverse, that is often difficult to determine. We all see lots of different image uses in our daily activity, but often these are of little help in determining what customers really want to buy.
VideoBlocks sends regular advisories to its contributors giving them information about the keywords customers use most frequently when looking for video clips. In this story you'll find a recent list of Top Selling Keywords.
Have you noticed that when a customer searches for “man” on some major agency sites a different number of images will be returned than if they had searched for “male.” An agent called this to my attention after hearing complaints from a number of customers about this problem when searching on GettyImages.com.
For agencies that offer subscriptions, Image-on-Demand and Enterprise options, how do “Comp Use” images affect search algorithms? There is an increasing trend driven by Adobe Stock and Shutterstock Enterprise to allow customers to download a lot of images for comp purposes and only pay for the ones they actually use in a final deliverable project.
Adobe has announced that it has added over 1 million HD video files from the Fotolia collection to the Adobe Stock offering. These can be searched, downloaded and licensed directly on an a la carte basis within Adobe Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC or from
stock.adobe.com for use with any CC desktop app. The video clips are also available to enterprise customers on a subscription basis.
If you love Shutterstock, are a Google Chrome user and want Shutterstock to know everywhere you go and everything you do on the Internet, you may want to install the new
Shutterstock Tab just launched today. You can get the tab free of charge by going to the
Chrome webstore.
Using GPS data – both manually and automatically entered -- 500px has put together a selection of beautiful images from the
25 most photographed cities of the world. These images are worth enjoying.
As more and more information consumers all over the world turn to the Internet for Information print publications are losing money. They can’t earn enough from Internet advertising to cover their costs. Traditionally, revenue from advertising has covered 50% or more of the total costs of operating a publication.
Shutterstock has released a
new infographic with information about how demand for certain subject matter is changing compared to a year ago. They have also included sample image in each category to give photographers a sense of what customers want.
Shutterstock has won the most images race with
Alamy. Shutterstock now has more than 60 million royalty-free images in its collection in addition to 3 million video and music clips for a total of over 63 million pieces of content.
Shutterstock has released a new
infographic on Design and Emotion in Stock Photography.
ImageBrief will be adding a stock search aspect called MyMarketplace in the near future. Right now they are reaching out to their premium photographers to collect images for this service. It is unclear when the actual service will be available for buyers to search, but it will add stock search to the briefing and finding a photographer they can hire directly features they already enjoy.
Picsbuffet (https://picsbuffet.com/#) offers a new method of image search that allows users to easily, visually explore huge sets of images. The images are laid side by side in a “map style” format with similar images close to each other.
Getty Images has been granted “interested party” status in the European Commission’s investigation into anticompetitive behavior by Google. Getty Images provides specialized image search and shopping services to end users in direct competition with Google.
Suppose there was a smartphone app that automatically sent every image capture to the cloud and stored all the metadata including date, time and exact location down to within 100 feet or less of where the picture was taken. (Also imagine if camera manufacturers built that into cameras.) It's coming!
Last week I wrote a story about “
Microsoft’s Research On Captioning Photos Automatically." I argued that this technology is a long way from being of much use to stock photo customers who trying to find useful photos for their projects. However,
helping users find photos may not be what Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are really trying to accomplish.
Microsoft recently published an article about the advancements they are making in developing technology that can automatically caption pictures. (See
here.) However, from the point of finding images on the Internet there is one big flaw in where they are headed.
In most cases there will be a huge number of choices that can reasonably have the same caption.
Microsoft say that worldwide there are about 400 new powerpoint presentations being prepared each second. That works out to about 12.6 billion presentations a year. A significant percentage of them use multiple images. Some are the creator’s personal images. But the vast majority are grabbed from the Internet via Google, Bing, Flickr or somewhere else. If users paid even $1.00 for each image used in such presentations the annual gross revenue might be more than 5 times the revenue generated worldwide by the stock photo industry.
Be sure to read Paul Melcher’s story in his
Kaptur Magazine about where image recognition software is headed.
The launch of Windows 10 later this year could dramatically change the way people find pictures. On April 29th during the annual Microstock Build Developers Conference in San Francisco Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella described how Microsoft intends to (1) Build the Intelligent Cloud, (2) Reinvent productivity and business process and (3) Create more personal computing.