The German microstock agency PantherMedia (
http://www.panthermedia.net), a German microstock agency with 28 million images in its collection, has relaunched its new website with the most comprehensive update in 10 years. Besides the clear new design, the website offers new products, new licences and additional features.
PantherMedia now offers all kind of purchasing options: Single images are downloaded on demand and paid by bank transfer, credit card or paypal. Another option is the download of images with a prepaid-account using so-called credits. Brand new to the service is now a third option to licence images: quotas. Customers choose their daily, monthly or annual quota of image downloads and the duration of the quota, either one-time or within a subscription. The price per image drops to as low as 20 Cents per image for subscriptions.
The use of royalty free images in social networks has been very controversial and mostly impossible. PantherMedia’s new social media licence is explicitely allowing the posting of images within social networks like facebook for a small additional fee, hence providing legal security for image buyers.
A strong strategic focus of the relaunch was the improvement of the image search. One new feature is the „Infinite Scroll“ that displays all search results on one page, saving the customer time to flip through multiple pages. This and other useful display functions are optional and activated in the search display settings. The extended search has been revamped with an elaborate colour search, that even enables the uploading of own images to trigger the colour search. Sixteen other search filters help the customer to find images faster, e.g. search by number of people or ethnicity.
Another optional and time-saving feature is the extended download that allows the cropping of images and the exact resizing of the downloaded image. Thus, photo editing software becomes redundant. Assigning images to projects, end customers or cost centers is extremely helpful for larger corporations, advertising agencies or designers. This new feature enables customers to sort images by groups, projects or cost centers and integrate references on licence certificates or invoices.
PantherMedia has also launched the new and free corporate account for customers with more than one art buyer. The customer can add and remove as many colleagues as required, share credits and quotas for image downloads with these colleagues, or see and download statistics. This means, all colleagues share the same pool of downloaded images without licensing images again and again. That is extremely helpful for international customers with many offices spread across the world and saves money utilizing volume discounts.
Peter Ammel, CTO of PantherMedia, is happy about the technological developments: „Besides the myriad new features and visible changes, most of our work was put into the backend of the system making it extremely scalable for future developments.“.
CEO Robert Walters adds: „That is only the beginning of a series of new developments we have planned for 2014. Personal customer service, legal security and quality are the principles that drive us. Understanding the customer needs globally and putting them into action locally are th