Photopreneur, a blog dedicated to sharing money-making opportunities for photographers on the Web, has released a WordPress plug-in that enables bloggers to find and post free images. Called iFlickr, the plug-in searches Creative Commons-licensed photos among Flickr's 2.5 billion images and guides the user through inserting select images into blog posts.
iFlickr downloads the selected image to the user's server, generates a photo attribution link, enables the user to input custom attribution text and works seamlessly within the WordPress interface. It also provides two ways to search for images.
According to its Web site, Photopreneur is published by longtime professional photographers, marketing experts and best-selling marketing writers, suggest the technical skills, business knowledge and marketing creativity needed to sell images. The "about" page reads: "While we expect our professional readers to be already earning income and to have effective marketing strategies in place, we hope that they too can find inspiration here and ideas that can help their businesses grow."
Among the site's recent posts are "5 Nightmare Photography Court Cases," "Photography Niches You Never Considered" and "47 Things People Will Pay You to Shoot." Many articles are particularly useful for pros not entirely comfortable with the digital world.
More importantly, Photopreneur and its new plug-in offer additional evidence of the growing role of Flickr in today's image licensing. While the blog does pay homage to legal issues and photo subjects that sell, Flickr dominates the subject matter with articles such as "36 Reasons Flickr is a Photographer's Ultimate Tool."
At press time, the publishers had not responded to inquiries of how iFlickr fits in with Photopreneur's mission of helping photographers earn income from images. However, at least some of the thinking behind the plug-in is found in Flickr-themed editorials. "How to Get Paid for Your Flickr Photos" says it helps to offer a few free photos to bring in users seeking no-cost images; however, the article also stresses that this is a promotional tactic: "Flickr popularity can translate into sales." Yet the stock-licensing industry has not had much success with upselling, be it from free to low-cost or from micro to traditional pricing.
The market also offers other similar tools. The recently released Compfight, for example, is even broader in scope. It searches by tags or text, allows users to restrict searches to CC-licensed images and locates originals, making finding the original image owner easier. It also makes it easier to find a free image.
Finally, iFlickr and Compfight address the needs of the market targeted by recently launched stock-industry products PicApp and Gumgum. While these have unique content, such as news and celebrity imagery from leading stock agencies, their creative-stock offering will have to contend with the availability of free Flickr-hosted content, made easily accessible by iFlickr and Compfight. Perhaps the growing blogger pool has room for both free and paid content.