Image Makers Stock Photography, Art & Illustration is looking for expressions of interest in purchasing the agency’s inventory which consists of 32,230 tightly-edited and extensively-keyworded digital images. Currently there are 172 individual artists, photographers & illustrators under contract.
PressFoto, has launched
ImageRent, a new service that makes more than 3.5 million stock photos immediately available for commercial, editorial or personal use online at a minimal cost. The maximum file sizes available are 72dpi, 600x600px web size images.
The creative team of Getty Images has just released a 132 page online book that gives examples and discusses the kind of photography customers currently want. It’s called
Creative InFocus and provides a glimpse of the new ideas and flavors the Getty team expects imagery to grow into over the next year. It is well worth a read.
Stipple, the San Francisco-based technology company, founded in 2010 with the vision of turning editorial photos into storefronts for consumers has closed its doors.
Recently, I received a request from Clive Thompson, columnist with
Wired Magazine, asking about the number of stock photography images licensed annually. He was more interested in the increase/decrease of the number of images sold than in any impact it might have had on revenue. Here’s what I told him.
Getty photographers are getting some surprising insights into the use of their images on Pinterest as they review their Getty sales reports this month. For many photographers over half the reported sales are for “Pinterest/Portal” usage. The gross fee paid to Getty for such usages is $0.03 and the photographer’s royalty share is $0.01.
Stocktrek Images with specialized image collections in Healthcare and Biomedical Science, Armed Forces, Military Aviation, Space, Weather, Astronomy and Dinosaur Art has introduced a $35 price for web and mobile use of its images. The new web and mobile sizes of 600-800 pixels are ideal for use on web sites, online ads, digital magazines, periodicals, mobile applications, tablets, and other handheld devices.
Getty Images has launched its iStock
subscription offering in an attempt to compete with
Shutterstock. There are two levels of iStock subscriptions – iStock Essentials and iStock Signature. With iStock’s offering customers can download 250 images a month with the monthly plan or 750 images a month with the annual plan. With Shutterstock there is a daily limit of 25 images a day (750 a month) regardless of which plan you purchase.
The
CEPIC Congress scheduled to be held in Berlin on June 4 through 7, 2014 is less than 2 months away. Already nearly 350 stock photo agents and industry suppliers are signed up to attend. For a full conference program see
here.
The
Permission Machine (PM) is a startup in Belgium that is trying to educate social media users that they need permission to use the images they find on the web and provide them with a simple, easy way to license uses.
Getty Images has announced the call for entries for its
Getty Images’ grants programs for 2014. The grants will include – The
Grants for Editorial Photography,
Creative Grants and the
Contour by Getty Images Portrait Prize – as well as the
Emerging Talent Award. The deadline for entry and Applications is May 15, 2014 by 11:59 p.m. GMT (London Time). For more information see
http://www.gettyimages.com/grants.
Peter Krogh has written a disturbing report about how the value of imagery is about to be slashed once again. It’s called The Fire Hose concept. We have reprinted his report with his permission. Peter is also author of the DAM Book (digital asset management) and a group of publications on the use of Lightroom 5. For information about these publications see
here.
Dreamstime has released a plugin for WordPress that enables WordPress users to easily access and embed free and commercial content from Dreamtime’s 22.5 million image library.
ASMP has announced two webinars later this month that should be of value to stock photographers and stock photo agents. Both are free if you sign up and listen at the scheduled time. These webinars will also be recorded and made available within a week after the event through a web link. ASMP members will be able to listen to them for free. Non-members will be charged a fee of $4.99.
Some say the whole idea of setting up
image registries is a waste of time because everyone will continue to go to Google, Bing and Yahoo and grab anything they find believing it is their right.
Late in 2013 the Patents County Court (PCC) that handles copyright claims in the UK was renamed the
Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) and a provision for submitting small claims was introduced. The small claims track is intended for claims with a value of up to £10,000 and where costs orders are tightly controlled.
Recently, on the “
Stock Photography, buy and sell your images” group on LinkedIn photographer Pierre Charrlau complained that his Getty Images sales have “greatly diminished” and wanted to know if others were having the same experience.
On its web site for Flickr contributors Getty asks, “What are the average prices for RM and RF?” and then gives the following answer. “The average licensing fee for royalty free ranges from $175 to $225. And for rights managed licensing, keeping in mind that uses and fees vary widely; the average is around $550-$650.”
Fotolia has decided that in order to attract more customers to their microstock offering they need to lower prices for professional users. They have created a members-only Dollar Photo Club and are promoting it to readers of Graphic Design USA (
GDUSA).
In celebration of the one-year anniversary of
Stocky United, Brianna Wettlaufer has been appointed CEO of the company. Wettlaufer, who was co-founder and former VP at iStockphoto, (which was acquired by Getty images for $50 million in 2006) brings over 10 years of leadership and innovation to her role.
The United States Copyright Office of the Library of Congress has published a final rule establishing adjusted fees for copyright registration. The new fee structure will go into effect on May 1, 2014. The fee for an application filed online will increase from $35 to $55. The fee for an application filed on paper will increase from $65 to $85.
Be careful what you write in your blog. It’s not private. Over the weekend I received a request from a former mid-level employee of a stock agency who wanted me to delete from our Selling Stock archive a story that was published in 2009.
PACA’s mission has always been to support a healthy and sustainable market for licensing the use of photographic images, as well as to encourage and support innovative ways for photography to be legally used in the rapidly changing marketplace. Clearly, models for licensing of photography have had a difficult time keeping pace with changes brought on by the Internet, social media, and the blogosphere.
The informal corporate motto for Google is “Don’t be evil.” This motto is sometimes incorrectly stated as Do no evil. But the company’s
image search tool facilitates and
encourages theft. The same is basically true of Bing and Yahoo.
After many years, the Ninth Circuit finally entered a decision in the Alaska Stock, LLC v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (HMH) case. In Anchorage U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland had originally tossed the federal lawsuit after finding that the photographs had been improperly registered with the Copyright Office.