Nashville microstock Dreamstime has introduced Stock Rank, a photo-review tool that offers its community members a competitive way of testing their photo IQ. At the same time, Dreamstime announced that it has amassed 6 million images.
Initially established as a quality assurance system for Dreamstime editors, Stock Rank is an interactive Flash tool that asks users to choose between two images based on their concept, subject, aesthetics, lighting and composition. The most sellable image should win such a commercial evaluation. As users progress from phase to phase, comparisons become more difficult.
Dreamstime hopes that this will isolate community members who can reliably evaluate stock imagery. In addition, the feature should be helpful in gathering buyer opinions on image quality and commercial potential: of Dreamstime’s 1.5 million users, only 70,000 are contributors. According to the company, this number of buyers makes it the second leading microstock—presumably next to iStockphoto.