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Articles from September 2016
Getty Images is asking image creators to add their names to an
open letter to U.S. Senators. The letter asks the Senators to say NO to Google’s anti-competitive Image Scraping practices that harm visual artists and other independent creators.
Getty announced on April 27th that it would file a complaint against Google with the European Commission concerning Google’s anti-competitive business practices. On May 20th, to the chagrin of CEPIC, they announced they
would not pursue a copyright case against Google in U.S. courts
It does little good to blame someone else for how things have changed. We’re not going back to the old ways. The important thing is to figure out how to move forward. As might be expected not all readers agree with my take on where the industry is headed. A month or so ago a reader wrote: “
When you write articles you must be impartial. The problem is you are very close to the Picture agencies that are destroying Photographer’s jobs. So its very difficult for you to be impartial.”
A month or so ago a reader wrote,
“When you write articles you must be impartial. The problem is you are very close to the Picture agencies that are destroying Photographer’s jobs. So its very difficult for you to be impartial.” Since then I have been doing a lot of thinking about “impartial,” It may be time for me to provide a clear explanation of how I see my role as editor of Selling Stock.
Photographers are discovering that
Getty is being paid fees by
Pinterest for images it doesn’t represent.
Getty Images has launched an
Adobe Photoshop plugin that allows user to find images in the Getty collection and then edit watermarked images in Photoshop. If any image found and manipulated in this manner is later purchased, the edits will be applied to the licensed content.
An increasingly competitive marketplace has led Yahoo-owned
Flickr Marketplace to bow out of the stock photography market. After Getty Images
terminated its agreement with Flickr in March 2014 that had enabled Getty to add almost 900,000 images from Flickr photographers to the Getty Images collection, Flickr decided it would set up its own Flickr Marketplace to market the images from its photographer community.
After publishing my
analysis of PicturEngine last week (9/14) Justin Brinson, PicturEngine CEO, made extensive comments. I’ve decided to re-publish the entire story with Justin’s comments inserted where he indicated. I hope this gives readers a clearer understanding of this new search engine.
One-hundred thirty-seven photographers from 27 countries responded to our
Stock Photo Revenue Trends survey. Forty-seven percent of the respondents were from North America and 14% from the UK. The rest were spread rather evenly among other countries.
Adobe has launched the public beta of the
Adobe Stock Contributor Site, a new platform that enables creatives to upload and sell their photos, illustrations, videos and vectors to the world’s largest creative community.
Recently, I was asked for my thoughts on stock photo
industry revenue growth between 1992 and 2016 with particular attention to the intermediate 8 year periods leading up to 2000 and 2008. I was also asked to make an estimate of the number of professional photographers in the world for the same years. I’ll deal with revenue growth first and the professional photographers later.
The 2016 Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA)
annual conference will be held in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Jersey City on October 27-29. DMLA is known for its exceptional educational programming related to current industry issues.
On 14 September 2016 the European Commission published its copyright package including a draft directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market for promoting a “fair and efficient European copyright-based economy”. CEPIC represents hundreds of picture agencies and hundreds of thousands of photographers.
CEPIC’s members have been digitizing visual content from the advent of the Internet. They license the resulting digital asset for all kinds of commercial uses, to newspapers, magazines, advertising, broadcasters, off and on-line, etc.
A new stock photo source called
Foto Sushi, LLC has launched a custom library of unique portrait photography suitable for any project. This small collection of what many photographers will classify as very simple images is interesting because it was created by Jon Anderson, a seasoned Art Director and Creative Director, who believes he has identified an unfulfilled need of his colleagues – image buyers.
After years of development
PicturEngine is about ready to begin promoting its search engine to customers. It has more than 500,000,000 keyword searchable images from 64 stock photo agencies and hundreds—soon to be thousands—of individual photographers.
Shutterstock has published a
infographic on The Top Trends Shaping The Future Of Imagery. Photographers looking to produce the kind of imagery customers want to buy may want to make note of these trends outlined by Keren Sachs, Director of Content Development at Shutterstock and Offset.
In the last few months I have argued that the stock photo industry needs smaller, better curated image collections. However, many of the major image collections have consciously decided that a totally opposite strategy is the best course of action. Agencies want to leave the curation process up to their customers.
The Mega Agency is partnering with the News and Entertainment division of Australia’s premier photo agency, Snapper Media, the two companies announced today, September 12th, 2016. The Snapper News and Entertainment division will operate under Mega’s name and both partners are confident the new venture will become an even more formidable player in the Australasian markets.
Are graphic designers trying to raise their clients to the next level of quality becoming frustrated with generic images and insisting on more images that relate specifically to the brand. Here’s what one website design company in Pittsburgh is doing.
Top Hat IMC, a Pittsburgh
website design company, has launched its very own in-house brand photography service.
The last day to respond to the
Stock Photo Revenue Trends Survey that we launched last month will be September 17, 2016. For more information about the survey see
here. The good news, so far, is that 13% of the respondents earn over $80,000 a year from stock sales alone.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that its vast collection of 100 million high-quality photos and illustrations is now accessible within Adobe Photoshop® software through its new custom built plugin. With more than 100,000 new images added every day, the Shutterstock plugin boasts the largest collection of photos and illustrations that can be licensed directly within the Creative Cloud desktop application.
I have a theory that a very high percentage of the uses of editorial or news pictures occur in the first month or two after they are shot. Newpapers, magazines and websites use the images when they are fresh and then move on to the next news happening. Of course, certain events will have historical value and key images from these events may be used over and over in future years – Iwo Jima flag raising, World Trade Center, Hindenburg crash, etc.– but it seems to me that such situations represent a very small percentage of overall use.
Students who have decided to study photography at the post secondary level (college or university) should sign up for the
Alamy Student Scheme and begin to get a realistic idea of the value of their work in the marketplace. Alamy can help the student learn what customer’s want.
Shutterstock, Inc. has acquired of over 700,000 images from two prominent photo collections: The Art Archive and The Kobal Collection. Both collections, previously held by UK-based The Picture Desk, are now available to Shutterstock Premier customers globally.
Yesterday, I talked about why the business of licensing rights to stock photos - as currently structured - is
Designed To Fail unless some major changes are made. Two of the changes needed are:
(1) make finding the right image for a project much easier for the buyer, and
(2) improving supplier efficiency.
The basic operating structure of how most stock photo agencies acquire and market images has not changed in 15 to 25 years. Image creator produce and submit their work to an agency. The agency may reject some of it, but most will go into an online collection that customer can review. When a customer finds something she wants to use she pays a fee and the image creator receives a percentage. The agency’s job is to manage the material, make customers aware that the collection exists, license use of the image for whatever they can get and collect money.
StockFood GmbH, one of Germany’s leading photo agencies, and
Science Photo Library (SPL), the world’s leading source of science and medicine content, have announced a strategic partnership aimed to deliver SPL’s collection of scientific imagery to the German market.
The Frans Lanting Studio, located in Santa Cruz, California, home base of one of the world’s foremost nature photographers has an opening for a Digital Asset Manager to manage the Studio’s digital assets from ingestion to application. The position requires proficiency in Mac OS, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Keynote, Microsoft Office.