April 29, 2008 by pmelcher.

Google is thinking about changing its Image search algorithm. Currently it has a convoluted way to return results. As you probably already know, its a basic “text” search which looks at the file name, “alt” comments and words around the image to declare an image a valid candidate to a search. Meaning that if you search for “cat” for example and someone has named an image of a truck “cat.jpg”, has put the description in the “alt” comments as “cat, cat and more cat” all that around an article about how great his cat is, then that image of the truck will appear in your search.

Not very efficient, is it ? And as previously written here, the image could be completly out of focus and grainy, as long as it meets all the requirement for Pagerank, it will appear high up in the results.

Called “PageRank for Product Image Search” and presented at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing by two Google staff engineers, it is aim at becoming the new VisualRank.

Claiming to be an image recognition system and using advance object recognition, here is what it does. It scans all images and looks for patterns, regardless of what object is in the image. After a while, it will see that some images or at least part of the image have the same pattern . Those will be linked. The image or images that have the most similarities with all the others will be pushed to the surface.It gives you a result like that :

See that image in the middle ? It contains all the attributes of the others, thus its the most relevant.

If applied this will create a headache for the photo business. Since this search is really made to search for products to purchase and not for images to license, it is counter productive for our industry. It will not return the best image, the most liked or the most striking, only the most banal, the most common. Ouch !

It will favor non exclusive images, think RF and microstock, over RM images. It will enhance the most used images not the best ones. It will slowly bring IPTC kewording to obsolescence.

In order to bring traffic to its website, a photo agency or photographer will have to post  images as much as possible everywhere all the time.The same image. Thus an image with a lot of various usage will be the star, while news images, who usually have a shorter life-span, will not score well. But an image of a spoon might become a superstar. Especially if it is sold everywhere

Google hates photography. Or rather it sees  it as a tool, not as an art. Another way to index the world.It will become harder to find great images with Google and that will continue to open a door wide open for anyone looking to create a search engine for photography with a ranking system based on quality and relevancy. An image search and not a visual search.

More on the emmerging proposal at Techcrunch.

Posted in IPTC, Search, technology, keyword, google, filter, flickr, editorial | Print | No Comments »

April 28, 2008 by pmelcher.

My youngest son, who is nine years old, and so much wiser then I am, saw me writing my blog one day. When I responded to his questions about what I was doing typing on my laptop, (after all, computers are made to play games, aren’t they?), he looked at me puzzled. He said ” are you doing this for free ?”

“yes”, I answered.

There was a short moment of silence. He then continued, after what had seemed a heavy and serious computing session in his brain .” Well, if you are helping people out and they like it, shouldn’t you charge for it?”

It was my turn to compute. “Well”, I answered, “I like helping people and I enjoy writing my blog. Isn’t that enough ?”

“True”, he said. He is a very generous guy. “But you have to pay for the website and electricity, and your time, no ?”

Ya, he’s down to earth too. That’s what a city like New York will do to a kid. “Shouldn’t you get something for it ?”

“mmm”, I said.”let me think about it”.

“sure” he replied, as he jump off the couch, “Can we go out an play now ?”

This conversation happened a bit more than 6 months ago and it has been in my mind ever since. I didn’t want to have a subscription fee or any other barriers. So I looked at was available out there and got this Paypal Donate button. Easy to set up, it allows anyone with a credit card to give something. Anytime they want and for any amount.

So there it is. It’s up to you. You decide if you want to us it or abuse it.

It would make the little guy happy.

Posted in focus, license, finance, transaction, editorial | Print | No Comments »

April 26, 2008 by pmelcher.

What is revolting about this image ? what makes people so upset ? what about this one ?

Those the image above makes you feel like screaming foul ? Do you want to pick up your phone and tell the exhibitor to pull them down, immediately. I fear not. besides being not very good, these image seem totally harmless, don’t they ?

Well Parisians are upset, very upset. A little background info would be good here:  Theses images where taken in Paris, by a french photographer called Andre Zucca for a magazine called Signal. They are amongst some of the earliest color photographs ever taken and depict parisians going about their daily life under nazi occupation. The problem is that Signal was a nazi propaganda magazine and that Andre Zucca, a french collaborator more than happy to show that the parisians where a bunch of happy people during that time.

Not so,  said some french human rights organization and  individuals. Parisians were suffering and all doing “resistance”. However, when one visits this exhibit, it is clear that none of the images are staged. Perhaps posed, but certainly not stage. There is even photographs of the “Rue des rosiers”, in the heart of the Parisian jewish neighborhood where one can see a few people walking, albeit one man visibly wearing a yellow cross:

Parisians who lived during this period do not want to be showed as happy citizen during this period. French people, in general, would rather show them heroically fighting against the occupant. Thus after many protests, the exhibitors have agreed to add some more information to go along with the images to better explain the situation.

What is interesting here is how very banal images can trigger so much heated reaction. The images themselves, quite frankly, are boring snapshots.Yet, a lot of people are up in arms saying they are insulted by these images. I found it fascinating that images can become insulting not by what they depict but rather by what they do not show. Besides resistance, they do not show the terribly difficult situation such a big city had to face in order to find the most basic food during a time of war.It doesn’t show the constant humiliation to having to live under an enemy force and arbitrary sets of rules. It doesn’t show the frustration of witnessing such violent acts and not being able to do anything about it.

Let’s face it. Not every man or woman is a hero. Not everyone is ready to pick up a gun and fight against the most powerful army at the time. And these images show part of that. The reality was far more ambiguous than be a resistant or be a collaborator. The lines were not clearly defined and certainly not simple to cross. Sometimes, just getting decent food for your family, your kids, was all a days work and no other business could occupy your mind.

It is easy for us to judge, from the comfort of our home, on a time and place we have never been close to.

These images had never been published before. The German Nazi kept color photography for war images only. Furthermore, color photography was such a difficult process at the time, it could only be taken in bright sunny days. That adds  impression  that the occupation was just a long hot sunny day. Obviously people look worst under gray or rainy days.

Finally, the photographer, who was never persecuted for helping the nazis , was not allowed to shoot sensitive areas, mostly where the Nazi lived or assembled, for security reasons. Thus, there are multiple  invisible underlying censorships in these images: the photographers eyes, the technical requirement of the film and the Nazi censorship.

The mayor of Paris has ordered fuller captions and organized debates around this exhibit of more than a thousand images. Sensibilities have to be managed as well as the truth needs to be massaged by many words, spoken or written.

We say that an image is worth a thousand words. Well, it this case, an images needs a thousand more words.

Can we consider these images photojournalism ? After all, Andre Zucca was one of the most  important war correspondent before the war, working for celebrated publication France Soir. This is what he saw, with the tools he had, and an assignment he was given. Not so much different then if Time magazine* would send a photographer in Afghanistan to shoot the daily life and asking the reporter to show the bright side of Kabhul life.

This photo exhibit has more than the eye can see and brings our comprehension of photography a step further. How we see or perceive an event, how we can sometimes feel  frustrated by its short coming, how it fixes into time who we are, and how we behave.

More info and a little sideshow here

*Time magazine, of course, is not a propaganda magazine and the American army is not the Nazi, far from it.

Posted in lens, magazine, photojournalism, editorial, france | Print | 2 Comments »

April 24, 2008 by pmelcher.

Image details: Pope Benedict XVI Celebrates Mass At Yankee Stadium served by picapp.com

It is a blessing these days to see a company that grows by listening to its criticism. Ad supported licensing company Picapp has recently revamped its site and has made some good improvements.  First and foremost, you can decide if you want or not that little pop up figure they call picaboo. You can also choose the size of the image you want to post and what type of an animation.

Thus after selecting your image, you can select between a goofy interface to a more serious one. What the people needed.

A quick down and dirty Alexa ranking shows Picapp  ahead of competitor Gumgum in traffic. No big surprise as they started with a big bang using the Getty  trampoline.

The real question is why did neither of these companies have open their service to individuals.

Sure, it is nice to have access to images from pros, but what about the huge pool of amateurs. This licensing model would much better serve the Flickr community than anyone else. After all, it would be a great replacement to the useless Creative Common scheme. ” here, use my picture for free, in exchange for which I get a cut on ads”. Fair enough, no ?

But neither Flickr, Photobucket, Smugmug and other mass photo storage platform will allow their content to be duplicate on either the Picapp or Gumgum server. The technology has to come to them. And that is the biggest shortcoming of both companies. Because their technology is neither proprietary neither that hard to create.

The second short coming is that neither offer the publisher any income for posting these images. Even the slightest cut would make either company immediately attractive. Imagine, get paid to post images !! Someone is bound to do it.

I can foresee very soon many  agencies offering the same type of licensing model from within their own site, bypassing the “Picgum” middle man.It would not be a problem for Flickr to add that option too. So it leaves both companies in breathless race to create enough critical mass of content to become indispensable. One, Picapp, has concentrate on overall volume, while the other, GumGum, seems to concentrate on just celebrity oriented content.

Let’s see what the future brings them. Either way, a very interesting race to watch.

Photo Licensing by GumGum | © PacificCoastNews

Posted in celebrity, copyright, alexa, technology, gumgum, license, keyword, filter, editorial, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, getty | Print | No Comments »

April 22, 2008 by pmelcher.

I would like to take a break and ask those of you who have, or will, threatened me with a lawsuit to please stop. In slightly more than a year since I have started writing this blog about the photo industry solely for my pleasure, I am now to the third lawsuit threat.

It is getting annoying. This is a blog, not a news outlet. I do not have the time to verify my facts and very often, I just go with my guts. I might be wrong, In which case a simple, polite email will do the trick. I have no problem admitting that I am wrong and making a correction. I have done it in the past and will do it again. Piece of cake.

This just shows the state of our industry where some companies feel that suing a blog like mine will change the perception that the world has of them. I have news for you : the world doesn’t care. They don’t even know we exist. When people open a magazine, they certainly enjoy the pictures they see, but they really, really do not care where they came from or how they made it in the magazine.  They hardly know what a photo editor does and even less what a photo agency is.

And they do not care. So all these claims that have made irreparable damages to your business are just stones in the wind. If you have great pictures to sell, they will buy them, regardless if I said you are a schmuck or not.

Furthermore, 90 % of the time, I just write about what everyone is talking about. It is no secret. And when people ask me not to repeat something, you know what ? I don’t.

So keep you hard earned money in your pockets instead of hiring an expensive New York lawyer who will have a hard time going after the first amendment of the United States  constitution. What happened to the ancient Greek  arts of dialogue, debate and healthy  conversations ? Why hire someone else to do your speaking on your behalf ?

If you have a problem with something I wrote, you have three options :

- stop reading my blog, nobody forces you to.

- send me an email  telling me where I have been wrong and if it is proven right, I will promptly make the correction.

- post a commentary. I have, to this date, never censored a comment, how nasty it might be.

But please remember that this is my opinion and nothing else. It is intended to trigger a reaction and a healthy debate. It is not the absolute truth but just my personal take on it. And for the sake of everyone else who do enjoy reading what I write (the majority, fortunately), please keep your lawyers handy for copyright infringements and other real threats to your business. Suing me and forcing  me to shut down my blog will NOT make your business profitable. And that is the truth.

Posted in magazine, copyright, editorial, law, news | Print | No Comments »

April 16, 2008 by pmelcher.

I did not pick this image. I actually have no idea what it will be before I publish this entry. Why ? because it is a sort of semi “intelligent” algorithm in the background that will do it for me. A bit like Google ads scans a whole web page for keywords and post the relevant ads, this system, delivered by Dailylife.com, does the same.

It will scan the page for keywords and post the most appropriate image. Like an automated photo editor. And because it is looking thought the feeds of Reuters, GettyImages and AP, I believe, it selects from a pool of already very tightly edited images. One could also foresee a Flickr API, a bit like I did with the yahoo pipes.

I am guaranteed a good and hopefully, relevant image . This is the future of news photo editing on the web. At least for sites that do not care so much about the image and use them as an illustration of  a written report. Why pay some guy to look at a stream of pre edited  images, download one, resize it and post when the whole thing can be automated. And better yet, computers don’t whine, do not take lunch breaks, or holidays and never, never ask for a raise. So why keep a web photo editor, if only to do some “best of the week” gallery ?

Think about it:  the biggest news source of the internet has no photo editor. It is called Google news and it selects images with a similar technology. Indeed, it relies on images previously edited by pro photo editors. For now.

The dailylife link is completely free, with no uncontrolled ads, like a Picapp or a GumGum would like you to swallow. Sure , it has a link for the site itself but the same technology could easily be applied by anyone on their own site.

Finally, Dailylife.com, still in Beta, looks like an interesting destination. It seems they want to be a new Google news but put a heavy emphasis on photography and has a much better and smoother interface. More like a magazine designed for the internet, and not the opposite. Finally.

As newspapers and magazine are suffering more layouts as ad spending is weakening, most of the photo related professional are turning to the internet. However, because of its built in automation, it just seems that some of the jobs will not be recycle but ultimately replaced by machines. We will still need great pictures, thus talented photographers. Not so sure about needing photo editors.

Posted in multimedia, Search, newspaper, digg, magazine, gumgum, technology, keyword, yahoo, editorial, news, slideshow, wire service, google, photojournalism, getty | Print | 2 Comments »

April 14, 2008 by pmelcher.

 Ever since I wrote the piece “orphan work is good for you”, I have been slammed with emails which all pretty much revolved around the same issue : Orphan work bill is a open door for Copyright Infringement and the legalization of free usage.

First and foremost, I keep on refering my readers to a very concise and readable link created by the Copyright Office . In no way do they propose or would facilitate free usage. It is not their intend. It is also quite admirable that they have, and will continue to hold hearings  to listen to all and everyones concerns.

But the most important, to me, is to see that Canada has had a Orphan Work bill in effect since 2005. Quite effective, it requires the potential user of an Orphan image, after proving its good faith in researching the copyright owner,  to be granted a license by the Copyright office. It has happened  only 19 since  then. Granted, Canada is not as big as the United States, but 19 is almost not worth a second look.

Furthermore, the Canadian law leaves 5 years after the license has been granted for the owner to retrieve his/her license. It is still early to see if this provision has ever been used by anyone.

The copyright office, and any all serious image licensor know very well that technology can be a very serious ally in copyright protection. Regardless of any petition and whining, the bill WILL pass.

As said before, It will be a great  incentive for everyone to respect metadata more seriously  and for the photo industry to finally grow up.

Posted in idee, Canada, focus, technology, copyright, license, web 2.0, keyword, IPTC, law | Print | No Comments »

April 12, 2008 by pmelcher.

A few good things are happening in the Photo agency world, at least in the USA.

First and foremost, it is the recent launch of ElevationPhotos. Created by Mick Magsino , ex Corbis, ex ImageDirect, Ex Getty, this new celebrity photo agency based in Los Angeles works exclusively on assignment. Instead of adding more red carpet images to the current flow (A photo editor at In Touch told me recently they receive about 80,000 images a week on spec), Mick applies a more intelligent approach by only covering events for which they are hired for. And it is working well. elevation photo were the official photographers of the Sarasota Film festival. Mick also finds the time to write a blog here.

Expect to see more of them in the near future.

Not too unrelated, is the opening of the Photoshot office in New York. Photoshot is a big agency in the UK, having recently acquired many smaller collection. Their offering is huge and covers the whole range of news, celebrity, nature, travel, sport and creative photography. They are, in a way, a smaller, yet very potent, Corbis/Getty. They distribute Elevation Photos in the UK. This opening is big news since it will offer a third offering to the US market, and place itself above Jupitermedia. Already, a lot of picture buyers cannot wait to have access to this huge pool of yet unseen images. Kris Hook, ex Corbis, heads the US sales operation.

Finally, there is the relaunch of AbacaUSA. The french photo agency has entered a stronger relationship with PA photo (the AP of england) in order to combine their forces and resources in the USA. Both agency also have a very rich library as well as a very active desk. Already in the USA for many years, Abaca has the advantage of knowing the market better than the two previous agencies. Coupled with PA’s firepower and credibility, this could be a killer relationship. Bruno Thiery, ex Abaca France is spearheading the effort.

As previously said, the editorial market is still strong and seems to be going the right way by partnering and finding new growth opportunities. Compare to the declining, disonauresque RM Commercial stock industry, this is refreshing news. Is it that the people running editorial agencies are smarter ?

Posted in license, Search, Jupiter, celebrity, magazine, newspaper, photojournalism, corbis, news, france, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

April 10, 2008 by pmelcher.

When you grow up, like me, with a dad who is director of Magnum, these guys become family. Because that’s what magnum is. It’s not a co-op, a photo agency, a club, but rather, a big dysfunctional family of extremely talented men and women.

Burt Glinn was the crazy funny uncle. He had an exquisite sense of humor rapped around such a charming personality. He was also the only one of the magnum founding guard that made sure no one took themselves too seriously. He was not always succesful at it, but he didn’t mind. As much as his images were serious, as much as he could not resist making jokes or witty comments on the world around him. He crunched on life as he was talking, enjoying its apple fresh juicy taste. He was a man of many, many talents, with his most important being his love of life.

Last time I met Burt was at his apartment on the Upper West side, a few years back. He was showing me how he was scanning all his images with the help of a few student-Interns with the excitement of a kid about to lunch his first self made rocket-ship. Burt was passionate about technology and understand very early on that photography was going to be digital or nothing at all. And for a man of his generation, he knew a lot.

Burt is going to be missed a lot. Not just as a the great, immensly talented photographer that he was, but as the wonderful piece of humanity that he was : a perfect soul.

Should you do anything of importance today, spend a moment to look at some of his images on the magnum site. He would have liked that.

Posted in lens, Magnum, photojournalism, slideshow, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »

April 9, 2008 by pmelcher.

 Paris, France. Spring of 1871.  After a four month siege of Paris by the Prussian army in a war started by Napoleon III, the French Government decides to surrender. In a decaying world where aristocracy is loosing its powers on the emerging working class,they also decide to let the German army parade in Paris. To add insult to injury, the french government relocates to Versailles, once the headquarters of the French Royalty.

The Parisian population, left defenseless, decide to take their fate in their own hands and organizes its protection. The Prussians, probably aware of the existing tensions, parade briefly and leave.  The population of Paris takes control of the city and start their own independent government, called the “commune”. It will later be an insperition to Karl Marx, thus the name “communist”.

The French government send troops into Paris and it’s a bloody civil war, with mass execution. The revolution of the Parisians will have lasted only two lonely spring months. But it still has repercussions today.

Archive photo Agency Roger-Viollet has put up some great photographs of the uprising. Because, before Capa, there where other Capa’s. Without the advantage of fast film, most of the images are posed and lack the action of our current photojournalism. But they are poignant as well. Just to show that great images can make you learn about distant conflict, even in time.

Some commentaries are in French, but the trip is very well worth it. View it here.

And for those in love with the eternal city of light, the main site is all about historical views of the city.

http://www.parisenimages.fr/

A great idea of what a photo agency can do when they think a little bit outside the box.

Posted in multimedia, magazine, technology, photojournalism, slideshow, france, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »