Getty Images has announced to its contributors that as part of its initiative to streamline and simplify its collections structure and improve customer experience it will be retiring Jupiterimages.com and Punchstock.com over the course of February and March.
Stockphotosecrets.com contacted 10 microstock agencies to determine what they believe will be visual trends in 2014. The agencies contacted were: Stocksy, PeopleImages, Fotolia, PantherMedia, Photocase, IngImage, Pixta, Photospin, YayImages, Dreamstime. Stockphotosecrets then compiled a list of
50 trends with photo examples of each. The list is well worth reviewing as you plan your photo shoots for 2014. Review the list
here.
It is getting harder and harder to decide which stock photography licensing model to use if a photographer’s goal is to maximize earnings. For a long time it was generally assumed that the way to maximize revenue was to license your images based on usage (Rights Managed). In this way the seller could charge a lot of money – sometimes many thousands of dollars -- when a customer wants to make extensive use of an image. The fatal flaw in the RM licensing strategy is that when every sale is negotiated, there is a tendency to accept whatever a customer is willing to pay. See some comparative statistics about all the licensing models.
Vital Imagery Ltd., a leader in the online graphics subscription services, announced today that it has acquired Clipart.com and AnimationFactory.com from
Getty Images. These pioneering websites offer royalty-free clipart, 3D images and animations, photos, photo objects, Microsoft PowerPoint templates, fonts, as well as video backgrounds, e-mail and web page backgrounds for use in commercial and personal projects.
Yesterday, I wrote about the problem of the
growing size of image databases and how this is making it difficult for customers to easily find the right image for their projects. Many good images are never seen by anyone because they get buried in the search returns delivered.
Recently on the Linkedin
Stock Photography blog Valerie Henschel asked, “When do you cull older non-selling images from your archive?” It is certainly something to think about. If customers are forced to go through a lot of outdated, mediocre or totally irrelevant images in order to find something that really fits their needs – and hopefully the best of that subject matter available in the collection – they are likely to give up and go elsewhere. As the choices of almost any photographic subject expand exponentially, this is becoming a bigger and bigger problem for buyers.
Shutterstock has published an infographic that outlines some
Global Design Trends 2014
based on its more than 350 million all-time downloads and over 100 million of them in 2013.
Do companies need an inexpensive catalogue of company-specific images showing their products and services being used by consumers?
FlashStock, Inc. thinks they do. Do the companies still need such images if that are all shot by part-time, amateur photographers using cellphones?
Alamy has announced that it will add vector graphics to offering as part of its strategy to provide a full service to image buyers. The company is launching with a collection of 500,000 vectors from leading suppliers including YAY media AS, Matthew Britton and Pavel Konovalov.
If you want to see beautiful pictures and know what’s happening visually in the world at large there is no better place to go than the
Time Lightbox. Each Friday the Time editors put together a 40 to 60 image slideshow of the best pictures that have come across their desks in the past week that were shot by news photographers around the world.