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Canva Has Huge Data Breach

By Jim Pickerell | 234 Words | Posted 5/30/2019 | Comments
Canva, the Australian Graphic Design site that claims to have 50 million premium photos available via subscription, detected a data breach on May 24th of the records of 139 million customers.

PhotoShelter Adds To Management Team

By Jim Pickerell | 308 Words | Posted 3/20/2019 | Comments
PhotoShelter, the leading digital asset management platform for visual storytellers, today announced two dynamic additions to the company’s management team: Kristine Muccigrosso and Daniel Salerno. Muccigrosso joins as the VP of Customer Success and Salerno as the Director of Talent and People Operations.

Finding The Right Image Gets Harder For Creatives

By Jim Pickerell | 707 Words | Posted 2/28/2019 | Comments
Did you know it takes Creatives twice as long to find an image that will work for their project as it did just 4 years ago? This is one of the facts that was uncovered in Visualsteam’s Annual Survey of Creative Pros. This 35-page report is packed with other information and insights that should help image licensors and image creators as they plan for the future. The report can be purchased for $69.95 by contacting fnyrf@ivfhnyfgrnz.pbz

20,000 Adobe Stock Contributors To Get CC Photography Plan Free In 2019

By Jim Pickerell | 388 Words | Posted 10/9/2018 | Comments
To incentivize Adobe Stock image and video contributors Adobe intends to provide the Creative Cloud Photography Plan (worth $120/£120), to 20,000 to them for free in 2019. You must already be an Adobe Stock contributor and either have had 300 or more photographs accepted, or made $500/£375 or more from sales.

NY Daily News Photographers Terminated

By Jim Pickerell | 361 Words | Posted 8/3/2018 | Comments
The New York Daily News a daily tabloid newspaper founded in 1919, and as of May 2016 the United States’ ninth-most widely circulated daily newspaper, eliminated the jobs of all 10 staff photographers as of July 23, 2018. In addition to the photographers two photo editing staff positions were also eliminated.

Model Releases: A Cautionary Tale

By Jim Pickerell | 516 Words | Posted 8/2/2018 | Comments
Photographers know they must have signed model releases for any non-news pictures they want to offer for licensing as stock photos. Commercial stock agencies like Getty Images or Shutterstock won’t accept photos unless they are accompanied by a signed release. But, do the photographers, or the models have any idea how the pictures might be used? Caution! Don’t let any of your models read The Indian Express story about Shubnum Kahn’s modeling  experience.

SmugMug Acquires Flickr

By Jim Pickerell | 942 Words | Posted 4/23/2018 | Comments
SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, has acquired Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath. Flickr was founded in 2004 and sold to Yahoo in 2005. Yahoo, in turn, was acquired by Verizon in 2016 for $4.83 billion. Verizon combined Flickr with AOL to create a new subsidiary called Oath.

VRmeta: New Video Keywording

By Jim Pickerell | 530 Words | Posted 3/22/2018 | Comments
One of the issues these videographers face is accurately tagging their video clips so they can be easily discovered by customers. Microstocksolutions LLC has released its VRmeta® app for iOS and Android that is designed to make it easier for videographers to accurately tag their digital video and 360°/ VR clips with time and location-based metadata.

Unsplash: How Free is Free?

By Jim Pickerell | 670 Words | Posted 2/21/2018 | Comments
Since its launch in 2013 Unsplash has been providing a platform where photographers can upload their images for the enjoyment of others. The photographers allow anyone to use their images for free, for any purpose and without credit. While the photo library only contains 400,000 photos (compared to the 180 million on Shutterstock), the company says it’s had more than 48 billion photo views and 310 million photo downloads since launch. Currently, it is seeing 10 photo downloads per second.

Teaching Journalists Where To Find Photos

By Jim Pickerell | 520 Words | Posted 2/15/2018 | Comments
The Poynter Institute, headquartered in St. Petersburg, FL, is considered by many to be a global leader in journalism education. Poynter claims to be “the world’s leading instructor, innovator, convener and resource for anyone who aspires to engage and inform citizens in 21st Century democracies.” In a recent article formatted as a conversation between two Poynter employees -- Kristen Hare and Ren LaForme -- the two took the position that it’s hard to get anyone to read an online article if it is not accompanied with an image.

Getty Images Announces Partnership With Google

By Jim Pickerell | 785 Words | Posted 2/9/2018 | Comments
Getty Images and Google have announced an agreement that includes a multi-year global licensing partnership, enabling Google to use Getty Images’ content within its various products and services. “This agreement between Getty Images and Google sets the stage for a very productive, collaborative relationship between our companies,” said Dawn Airey, CEO, Getty Images. “We will license our market leading content to Google, working closely with them to improve attribution of our contributors’ work and thereby growing the ecosystem.”

Pray Your Images Won’t Be Used Online

By Jim Pickerell | 1094 Words | Posted 1/22/2018 | Comments
If you want to earn more for the images you produce, and for there to be less unauthorized use, maybe you should be praying that your images won’t get used by customers online. For many this may sound like heresy, or at the very least, ridiculous. Doesn’t everyone want more people to see and use their images? Consider this analysis.

The Cost Of Trusted Information

By Jim Pickerell | 708 Words | Posted 12/27/2017 | Comments
The European Parliament is debating new legislation that could require Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players to share some of the advertising revenue they earn from making the information produced and supplied by major European press agencies available to readers for free.

Do All Google Searchers Expect FREE Images?

By Jim Pickerell | 588 Words | Posted 12/4/2017 | Comments
Jim Domke, creator of the Domke Camera Bag, recently commented about my Can Customers Find You article. He said, “Those searching for photos on Google or Bing are searching for FREE photos.” I disagree.

Tired Of Low Prices? Here’s A Possible Solution

By Jim Pickerell | 1068 Words | Posted 11/29/2017 | Comments
Tired of low stock photo prices? Maybe you ought to license your images to customers direct. More and more customers are finding the images they need by searching Google. Sometimes the image may be one of yours that is represented by an agency. You may be able to get these searchers to come directly to you.

Wining Photo Contests

By Jim Pickerell | 154 Words | Posted 9/7/2017 | Comments
It is no longer necessary to take pictures in order to win photo contest. Photographers who share their images on public domain sites are sometimes surprised to learn that others have taken their images, entered them in photo contests and won awards.

TopImageSites: New Marketing Option

By Jim Pickerell | 839 Words | Posted 7/6/2017 | Comments
There is a new website called TopImageSites that, in theory, will help customers find “The Best Stock Images On The Web.” Ten agencies are listed and the number of “products” available in each agency’s collection are listed in the chart below. Products include: photos, vectors, illustration, videos and audio files. Some of the agencies don’t have audio files and Panthermedia doesn’t have either video or audio.

What Does Image Curation Mean?

By Jim Pickerell | 495 Words | Posted 6/29/2017 | Comments
I just received a press release from Envato Elements that offers “inspiring and ready-to-use photos, templates, fonts and assets” for $29 a month. They say Envato Elements “now includes 200,000 hand picked photos” from its PhotoDune collection of 9 million photos. (Actually, there are currently 244,085 photos in the Elements collection.)

Danita Delimont: New Website Design

By Jim Pickerell | 301 Words | Posted 6/28/2017 | Comments
Danita Delimont Stock Photography has launched a new website design with large photos and roll over pop ups. The site’s new Galleries section shows tightly edited collections of the best images in 48 of the most popular subject categories they have to offer.

EU Fines Google $2.72 Billion For Unfair Practices

By Jim Pickerell | 584 Words | Posted 6/27/2017 | Comments
The European Commission, which polices European Union competition rules, has imposed a  €2.42 billion euros ($2.72 Billion) fine on Google for breaching antitrust rules with its online shopping service. The ruling alleges that "Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service." Google was given 90 days to stop or face fines of up to 5 percent of the average daily worldwide turnover of parent company Alphabet.

Photography At The New York Times

By Jim Pickerell | 445 Words | Posted 6/19/2017 | Comments
The New York Times 2020 Group published a report in January 2017 that said its daily reporting needed to become more visual. In April it was reported the day rate for freelance assignments would jump from a previous $200 to $250 (according to some contributors) to $450, with shorter assignments “that don’t meet the full day-rate requirement” paying out at $300, still higher than the previous full day rate.

How the Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

By Jim Pickerell | 204 Words | Posted 3/17/2017 | Comments
Stock photo sellers and producers should read the New York Times story “How the Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It”  (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/learning/questions-for-how-the-internet-is-saving-culture-not-killing-it.html?_r=0 ) The story makes the argument that increasingly Internet users are willing to pay for certain content and no longer expecting that everything they find on the Internet should be free.

How Publications Could Grow Revenue (And Have More To Pay For Photos)

By Jim Pickerell | 862 Words | Posted 10/7/2015 | Comments
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.

Questions For Braut At DMLA Conference

By Jim Pickerell | 545 Words | Posted 10/6/2015 | Comments
Scott Braut, Head of Content at Adobe, is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) (formerly PACA) annual meeting in New York on Monday October 26, 2015 at 9:00am. Single session passes for the keynote address only are available for $65. For more information, see here under events. (Hint: you may need to expand your window.)

Are You Watching Trends In Online Ads?

By Jim Pickerell | 715 Words | Posted 10/2/2015 | Comments
Have you been watching the ads lately when you do online searches? Yesterday, I was reading a news story on Yahoo about U.S. manufacturing and three different Adobe Creative Cloud ads were delivered in connection with that one story. Two of the ads included the “St” icon promoting Adobe Stock.