In a recent promotion ImageBrief sent out a link to its “
What’s Selling” collection. This is a hand picked subset of sold images specifically organized for photographers who have asked for insights into the type of images clients are buying.
While somewhat useful for photographers looking for some idea of what customers are actually purchasing, the collection is very difficult to search through. Photographers must do a continuous scroll through images on all conceivable subject. Every 40 images or so gets a “Hold tight, there’s more coming…” notice. Then the searcher must wait for the next batch of images to show up.
It would be much more useful if the images were delivered by categories such as “babies,” “retirees,” “teamwork,” “climate change,” etc. ImageBrief already has the images in its collection organized into more than
72 different categories and it is hard to see why they didn’t organize these “sellers” into the same categories.
If the photographer rolls over any image they can click on a “More Like This” button. However, that only shows similar images in the general category clicked on, but none of these images have necessarily sold. This may be confusing or misleading to photographers looking for guidance as to what to shoot and what customers are actually buying.
There is no indication as to what period of time these “sold” images cover. I laboriously scrolled through over 800 and have no idea how many more there might have been to review, or if the ones included showed images that had sold in the last few months, or few years.
The idea of helping photographers understand what customers are buying is a good one, but the execution was poor.