I have traditionally used utilities such as Tineye to assist in determining where my images are being used. They do an excellent job of identifying images or portions of an image, but they have not indexed a lot of my photos, despite have a business relationship with Photoshelter who host my image archive.

Google recently released a new image search function which is almost the opposite of Tineye, having indexed a larger percentage of my images,  but their partial image recognition is lacking …. no doubt they have people working on improving this.

Check out these links to read more on Google Image search:-

• Google Announces New Image Search – APhotoEditor
• Google adds Search by Image – David Sanger
• Google’s new Search By Image: TinEye on Steroids! – Fair Trade Photographer

To me as a photographer, the perfect match would be if Google purchased Tineye and combined the technologies… major indexing clout, combined with powerful image recognition.

I decided to take the Google image search function for a spin and see what it could do.

One of  the results that struck me most, was a image of the inside of a computer portable hard disk drive posted to Flickr less than one month ago . This image has a Rights Managed (RM) copyright license which has special conditions for offering exclusivity of use, and I know from my records that it has not sold from any of my stock photography sites.

Doing a Google search, I see my image appears on a number of other sites. Visiting each site, I was able to identify the images came from my my Flickr account, as I use slightly different copyright watermarks on each site that I post images.

This was very concerning to me. I only post selected images on Flickr, all with a “Rights Reserved” designation, and a “Do not copy” warning notice. I also have Sharing functions and access to original images disabled in the Flickr Privacy & Permission menu.

I sent an email off to the friendly people at Flickr support, and received the following reply:-

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care.

Before I go into addressing your concern, I’d like to first apologize for the delay in my responding to your inquiry. We are committed to answering your questions as quickly and accurately as possible. However, we are currently receiving unusually high volumes which caused the delayed response.

I understand that you have a concern with your photos that are showing on the other website like XYZ (name changed to protect the innocent… Carl), even though it was set as All Rights Reserve and disabled the sharing options. Allow me to provide the information you need.

There are a few ways that your photo might be displayed outside of Flickr, but still hosted here. Some of the ways include:

* Blogs

* Tag search applications

* Web-based games (often fun memory based programs)

* Screen savers (displaying most recent uploads or photos from Explore, etc.)

* Desktop photo display widgets (like Apple’s Dashboard or Yahoo! Widgets)

Through the Flickr API, it is possible to construct such websites and applications that query Flickr’s publicly available photos via tags or user ID and build dynamic content that displays photos in interesting ways. If they are properly using the Flickr API and abiding by the requirements, the photo as seen on the page will link back to the photo page as it is found in your photostream, and it will be for non-commercial use. The actual image itself is not hosted on that site, but the display will probably look different than what you are used to.

If you would rather your photos did not show on these sites, you can opt-out here:

http://flickr.com/account/prefs/apioptout

Your photos will still be searchable on Flickr.com, and you will still be able to use third-party sites for your own stream (ex., our printing partners).

Separate from the API Opt-out, we offer the opportunity for users to hide the “Blog This” button above your images:

http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/blogging/

This will prevent people from using Flickr’s integrated blogging feature found above a photo though it is not a guarantee that your photo will not be blogged manually.

Note: There are a few instances where your image may be hosted on Flickr, but someone has just linked to the static image element and not through to your photostream itself. This is against the Flickr Community Guidelines. If you have questions about that, feel free to drop us a note via Help by Email:

http://www.flickr.com/help/website/#7

Thank you again for contacting us. If you have any other questions, please feel free to reply to this email.

Regards,

Flickr Customer Care

Now I maybe missing something, but I have never seen the API opt-out setting on any of my account menus…. this should be readily available to the account holder.

After contacting the offending sites, I found a couple of people used third party programs utilising the Flickr API to download images for their sites and blogs. Some applications like Zemanta do a good job and filter images by license before providing content to their users, and also embed special code to show their application was used. However, other applications are unfortunately much less detailed or compliant in the design of their software.

Some offending sites appear to have been subscribed to auto-posting software (such as Simplespeed ) which automatically reposts web page  content and images to other sites, replicating the unlicensed image around the web.

… what a nightmare for photographers.

Conclusion

I spent hours chasing down the relevant site owners, and most were very good about removing the unlicensed images.

However, the rate at which images seem to be able to propagate around the web without appropriate licensing is mind boggling and getting very scary. As a photographer it’s getting more difficult to control the licensing I can offer my clients, while maintaining a presence in the social media sphere.

From several past blog posts and podcasts, I know some elite photographers such as Trey Ratcliff (Stuck in Customs) are happy for their images to be shared around the web to increase visability, and I can understand that point of view.

For now I have opted-out of the Flickr API, and disabled the “Blog this feature” while I internally debate my options. I will continue to operate my Flickr account, as it has been a source of some excellent business contact referrals, but if my lunch continues to be given away, I may consider shutting it down.

Guess the key lesson is to be very careful with your settings when promoting your images through social media platforms, and watermark all your images.

I’m interested to hear others experiences and opinions.

Carl Chapman

Reviewing the pricing of my images recently, I searched for a solution that would indicate if I was even in the ballpark.

First I had to determine the licensing option to use … Rights Managed (RM), Royalty Free (RF) or microstock.

There is always a lot of talk and confusion on the internet surrounding pricing and licensing models. Browsing around iTunes I came across two episodes of the Photonetcast Photography podcast that helped make some sense of the issue.

• PhotoNetCast #31 – Stock Photography and different Licensing Models (April 2009) – Takes a look inside the business models of stock photographers Rich Legg and David Sanger . They discuss  their respective choices, advantages and disadvantages, marketing their photography,  and compare licensing photography with a Royalty Free or Rights Managed  model.
• PhotoNetCast #49 – Revamping the pricing model for Rights-Managed Licenses (March 2010) – A discussion with Jim Pickerell covering an alternative to Royalty Free and Rights Managed  licensing models.

Many of my new images are configured for Rights Managed licensing, and pricing is handled automatically by fotoQuote software integrated into my Photoshelter based website. I find this very useful as the software is based on industry rates, and can supply the buyer with the best price for the usage they require. (This price is often lower than the Royalty Free equivalent).

I also have a number of images that have been sold through various stock sites in the past. This limits me to selling them with a Royalty Free licensing model, as you cannot use a RM  license for an image once it has sold as RF.

Configuring the Royalty Free pricing profiles on my Photoshelter site, I am required to specify the individual prices for each size of image.  To try and establish a market rate, I looked around at other photographers sites and found the pricing varied widely.

Taking a more scientific approach to the problem, I decided to analyse a couple of the internet agencies that sell Royalty Free stock images, and settled on Alamy, Getty Images, Corbis and Ozstockimages.

The bigger sites have collections that are priced differently, so I sampled images from various collections, and also some underwater images to make the selections relevant to my own photography.

Figure 1 – Royalty Free stock photography pricing comparison (1USD = 1 AUD) – click to enlarge

Each agency was assigned a colour (e.g Alamy is red), and different collections are represented by different line types (shown in the legend).

All samples except Alamy are priced in Australian Dollars (AUD), and Alamy samples are in US Dollars (USD). At the time I did this comparison the exchange rate was 1USD = 1 AUD.

Looking at Figure 1, there is a tight pricing window for images below 1400 pixels (on the longest edge), which I expect is due to fierce competition in this market space. Above 1700 pixels the pricing varies depending on the agency collection. This is expected as stock agencies will market different collections to clients with different price points.

Alamy seemed to be much lower than others at larger picture sizes. The Australian dollar is quite strong at the moment, so I decided to use the exchange rate of 1AUD= 0.85 USD from a couple of years ago. It had the effect of rising the Alamy price more in line with other agencies (shown in figure 2 below).

Figure 2 – Royalty Free stock photography pricing comparison (1 AUD = 0.85 USD) – click to enlarge

Even with exchange rate compensation, Alamy still has some of the lowest pricing for images above 2300 pixels. If you are a buyer in a country which has a strong currency against the US dollar, this offers good purchasing value. If you are a seller you are earning less per image. (I expect that as with software sales, there is a mark-up applied to images sold through the Australian portals of the larger agencies, which might also explain some of the pricing difference.)

The advantage of looking at the sample pricing visually, is that I can now see a clear pricing window, which is really useful to determine if I am above or below the market rate.

Yes there is some variation at the larger end, but it is better than a stab in the dark, and allows me to make a more informed decision on pricing.

I hope this has been useful.

More reading:-

• How much should you charge for a photograph – pixiq
• Flatter stock licensing tiers – Dan Hellar
• Photolicensingoptions.com
• Pricing and Negotiating – Pricing Photography for Image Libraries

Carl Chapman

Confined to the office today while waiting for the next cyclone to hit, I decided to update some images on one of my commercial websites. Browsing various microstock sites, I was struck by the variation of image quality and lack of creative content.

I decided to update some of the images on one of my commercial websites, as they no longer represented the message I was trying to convey, and set about trawling the microstock web for replacements.

Free Microstock

I started by searching around some of the free microstock sites such as  Stock.Xchng, Stock Vault, and Dreamstime Free Stock.

There were a couple of good images in the free stock collections, but in most cases the variety of images is small and the quality is pretty poor.

I also came across the EverystockPhoto website, which interestingly collects photos from a number of sources, including indexing Flickr images. A couple of things surprised me:-

• The images from Flickr seem to be based on Creative Commons licenses. Depending on your privacy/usage selection in Flickr, it is possible images of your friends, family or even last year’s Christmas party could appear on this site for others to use.
• The site is caching the Flickr images. Clicking on a few of the images Flickr links, the browser goes to the Flickr site and says either the image has been deleted, or the user no longer exists. The worry here is that you may have thought deleting your image from your Flickr account gets rid of it, but in fact it can still exist on this and other sites…. (As a Flickr user, I am not sure I am comfortable with this.)
• The site uses an Attribution License System, but I wonder how many users would actually attribute the image to a photographer on their site, or in a document. It reminds me of the recent case where a leading newspaper used a Photographers image without consent.

Paid Microstock

Unable to find any satisfactory free images, I started browsing paid microstock sites such as iStockphoto, Shutterstock, etc.

It was an interesting experience being a buyer looking for particular images to illustrate a concept. Having a photography background and a particular requirement in mind, you tend to be quite harsh in critiquing others work. Thinking about how you could improve others images is an excellent learning experience on how to improve your own photography.

The image quality on the microstock sites seemed to fall into 3 categories:- professional, quite good, and poor….. and there were a lot of poor quality images.

The professional quality images really stood out, but I was surprised that many of them had just been thrown together without much thought put into layout and construction. E.g. I was searching for an image similar to that above, but could not find any from the 2000+ search results on iStockphoto, that contained a computer keyboard and notepad shot from a low angle. Many of the keyboard images were taken from a position directly above, and lacked any creative thought.  In several cases it appears the photographer has moved the elements around to make multiple images, but has not thought about composition or making a good image.

While digging around, I also found a number of images that would be useful for my elearning courses. With elearning taking off, the market for learning and web content will continue to expand, and in turn increase the requirement for quality microstock images.

In Summary

With free microstock images you generally get what you pay for. The selection is limited and the quality is not that great.

Paid microstock images are a viable solution for professional looking images for use in websites and eLearning courses, however the image quality and creativeness can vary widely.

As a photographer, putting yourself into the position of a buyer can be an excellent educational experience. It gives you a chance to critique others images and determine how you could do better, while analysing collections for niche gaps that provide possible business opportunities.

I learned quite a bit from being a buyer today, and in future am going to put more thought into the composition of my images.

Microstock Newsletter

I have been a subscriber to Lee Torens newsletter from Microstock Diaries for a  few months, and there is quite a bit of useful information when you dig around the site. I find the regular updates on how Lee’s stock is selling across different sites interesting.

Tracking spreadsheet

I was getting a bit confused over which images I had submitted as the number of images built up, and found it useful to build a excel spreadsheet to keep track of it. (I looked for a field in Lightroom that could help with this, but could not find anything.)

Some stock sites delete images if they have been rejected, so it is hard to determine what has not been submitted or rejected. In the spreadsheet, I can track what has been submitted, accepted, and rejected.

I also have a couple of columns where I can record images statistics from sites such as flickr. This helps give me an idea of what images are popular.

Image Rejection

I can also record the reason for each image rejection in the spreadsheet. Over time this gives you a picture of trends as to what sort of images a particular stock agency is interested in. (e.g some agencies do not like the film grain in my high resolution slide scans, but others like the scans for their large size.)

Each stock agency is trying to cater to particular customers requirements, and an image that fulfills the requirements on one site will not necessarily fulfill the requirements of another.  The classic rejection comments are “not aesthetically acceptable” or “no business value”. In other words, there is technically nothing wrong, but they just don’t like your image. Unfortunately, this can also be down to the individual reviewer (…reminds me of English literature at school).

I try not to get too stressed over such comments because I know the image in question is selling on another site….

Submission Notification

Some stock sites send you an email notification when images have been processed with details of acceptance or rejection, and some sites do not. For those that do not send notification, the spreadsheet becomes more important. Reviewing it regularly will remind you to check the status of submitted images.

FTP Upload

Most major sites allow you to upload images by FTP. If you have several images to upload, using FTP can make the workflow a bit smoother than uploading one image at a time.

Keywording

Keywords are really important in stock photography if you want people to find your images. Each stock agency seems to have their own approach to keywording formats.

• Some sites allow multi-word keywords in commas: – e.g  reef, coral reef, fish
• Some sites do not use commas and allow multi-keywords in exclamation marks:- eg. reef  “coral reef” fish
• Some sites only allow single words, taking multi-word keywords  and stripping them down and delete duplicates: – eg. reef, coral, fish

There are also differences between sites for minimum numbers of keywords. Some sites require a minimum of 5 keywords, some 7 and some 10. Naturally the more accurate keywords you can use to describe a picture the more chance it has of being found.

Unfortunately there is no way around this, and you just have to deal with each sites requirements.

Conclusion

In these days where every dollars counts, it is worth keeping track of each submitted image, and treating your stock submissions as the business that they are. Attention to detail is important.

I hope these tips have been helpful. Let me know if you have any others…..

I can understand that different agencies are looking for different picture styles, but some quality comments leave me totally bamboozled, including:-

• An image is rejected because of “Limited commercial value due to composition”, when the same image is listed with three other stock agencies and has sold multiple times.
• An image is rejected for being “soft” at one agency, but accepted by two other agencies.
• Cases where one reviewer will reject an image for something like too much shadow or noise, but another reviewer at the same agency will approve it.
• An image is rejected for colour cast, when the slight cast is part of the image design.

I guess it comes back to the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone sees something different in an image.

This is an interesting lessen in personnel taste, and shows how futile it is to try and  design an image that suits everyone.