Category Archives: Stock Photography

Flickr Stock Photography Finally

By Chris Garrett | Published July 9, 2008

Finally Flickr users will have a chance to sell their images via Getty, but don’t get too excited yet, as the Yahoo! announcement says, it’s not for everyone
Getty Images and Flickr are working together to establish the first commercial licensing opportunity for photo-enthusiasts in the Flickr community. The Flickr collection will feature photography selected by [...]

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Zooomr as Stock Agency Details

By Chris Garrett | Published July 19, 2007

More details of Zooomrs Micro Stock plans have been revealed by Thomas Hawk
at Zooomr we are in the process of building what will soon be the world’s largest stock photography agency. We think we can pay photographers out 90% and still operate our business. We also are going to let photographers set their price on [...]

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Zooomr To Take On Stock Photography Giants?

By Chris Garrett | Published June 29, 2006

For quite a while I have thought that Flickr should allow sales of photographs by its users. Flickr as a stock photography library is something I have discussed here before and it seems that since Thomas Hawk joined Zooomr they have been looking at it as a business model…

Here is a titbit from Thomas Hawk’s blog

One of the things we want to do at Zooomr is to help the pro/am photographer monetize their photostream within the photosharing space

Out of everything else going for Zooomr that could be one reason to switch. Zooomr doesn’t offer me anything to set my world alight so I would much prefer Flickr to offer this but if they don’t then Zooomr might be worth a try.

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Royalty Free Stock Photography Doesn’t Seem That Great A Deal Now?

By Chris Garrett | Published June 19, 2006

This from StockPhotoTalk is both an inspiring and at the same time woeful tale of all that is good and bad with royalty free stock photography …

Carl Purcell is a travel photographer whose art has graced publications ranging from National Geographic and U.S. News and World Report to travel sections in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Still, an online archive at corbis.com is home to 12,800 of his more than 300,000 photos and is a primary source of income for him. One popular photo alone — of palms blowing in a typhoon in the South Pacific — has netted more than $25,000, Purcell says. But this 77-year-old retiree’s most famous image — a billowing American flag merged with the Statue of Liberty — appears on a 39-cent stamp. [..] Unfortunately for Purcell, the 8-year-old image credited to him and his former wife, Ann, was one of a handful of royalty-free photos available from an Internet archive. “The only payment I got for it was a check for $150,” he says ruefully.

So his art has found success, he has even made a bunch of cash ($25k is not to be sniffed at unless you just happen to be the hobby digital photographer called Bill Gates), and his picture even graced a stamp for goodness sake, success! Wouldn’t you feel you had been kicked in the nuts every time you received some mail stamped with your now bargain-basement image?

Thing is they probably wouldn’t have seen let alone used his image had it not been in there and how many people can claim to have had their photographs seen by as many people?

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Stock Photography: Just Say No?

By Chris Garrett | Published May 26, 2006

It seems Ken Rockwell has an itch he has to scratch about Stock Photography

Call me a naysayer, but this doesn’t seem like a way to make money. I’ve always made money by differentiating myself. Stock is the antithesis of differentiation. Say “NO!” all you want to royalty-free websites like istockphoto.com and the royalty-free discs of several years ago, but so long as enough photographers say YES! to submitting to these folks that will set the market price. This is exactly why I’m too chicken to mess with stock: enough others submit their work for nothing, so no one is going to pay me any more.

When I worked for a marketing agency there were quite a few occasions where stock photography was used but that tended towards those projects where the budget was low, deadlines were tight and the picture requirement was very generic. Other than the top stock libraries like Getty that have some real top photographers on their books, I think the stock photography that Ken is so against is the domain of the “$10 template” website hack, they are not his market anyway.

It is tempting to think I could make a passive income from stock photos but I can’t see me getting up the enthusiasm to take photographs JUST to submit to a library. If someone was to come along and ask to purchase rights to use a picture that would be a completely different proposition.

Having said that, there is a lot of people making money and having fun. Don’t knock it till you have tried it, I just might give it a go.

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Flickr as Stock Photography Library update

By Chris Garrett | Published May 22, 2006

Recall I wondered what was stopping Flickr adding stock photo features? It seems people better equipped to debate the issue have already been thinking about it …

Will Flickr Enter The Commercial Stock Photography Business?

Flickr/Yahoo recently announced in the category Product/General Management two new interesting vacancies for a Product Manager A and a Product Manager B, which raises the question if Flickr will enter the commercial stock photo market in the not too distant future, with selected and rights cleared images of its huge image library.

I hadn’t thought about things like model releases, and all that legal stuff, but I am sure if companies are making a profit selling stock photography with far less technical savvy, legal support or investment as Flickr then the boys from Flickr/Yahoo! could crack it.

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Flickr, Why Not Stock Photography?

By Chris Garrett | Published May 15, 2006

Thomas Hawk makes a good point about Flickr image search being way better than that from Google or Yahoo!

Does Middle America know to go to Flickr and do a search for birthdaycake and then to change the view to sort by interestingness to get some kick ass photos of birthday cakes for the homemade card that you are going to make for Aunt Betty?(beachycat, that’s a kick ass photo of those candles). Of course not. But they do know to go to Yahoo! image search and type in Birthday Cake and find an image. And they do know that if all of the photos of Birthday cakes on Yahoo Image Search suck (which they all do by the way) that they can go to Google Image Search and search for birthday cakes there (and they still suck).

BUT, he goes on to say he thought about creating his own Web2.0 stock photography company. Here’s the thing, we have one right there in Flickr, you don’t need another company. Flickr just need to add that functionality to their own system.

At present there is a large, tagged, ranked database of great photography. IP rights are applied at varying degrees. How hard would it be to add another layer where you can mark an image so you can only get full size if you pay for it? Family; tick, Friends; tick; Customer; tick. Also it wouldn’t be too tricky to have an option where other sizes are watermarked even.

Many of the people I talk to who use Flickr have the images on Alemy, etc. There could be some mega revenue in there, why are they focussing on the consumer aspects when they could commercialise the images for those who want it?

Flickr could be a kick-ass stock photography library.

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