July 10, 2011 by pmelcher.

Let’s face it, you are waging a losing battle. In fact, it’s not even a battle because one side has won already. Every time you sign up for a social network, be it Facebook, Twitter or Google +, you are faced with TOS ( Terms of Service) that are pure rights grabbing, making it a very dangerous proposition for you to share your images. Yet, everyone tells you that the only path to success is to have your images on these sites.

So, here are three core facts that you need to know about Social Networks:

- There is still no such thing as a free lunch. If someone offers you something for free, it is only because they get some kind of benefit out of it. You can be sure they will find a way to monetize your images.

- If you use a service for free, you become the product : what do you think Facebook, Twitter or Google + sell ? You. Your interaction on their sites is what they in turn sell to advertisers. That includes your pictures.

- They need the legal right to share your images. In order to show the images you post on their site to your friends and family, they need the legal right to do so. Since there is no way for them to know who are your friends, family or others ( nor do they care) , they make you agree to a blanket agreement stating that they can share them with everyone.

So, if you think you can sign up for a social network site that will protect your intellectual property, you are sticking your big left toe in your eye. It is just not and never going to happen. The answer ? Deal with it.

Accept the fact that if you post your images on a social network site, there is a 110 % chance that you could loose complete control of that image. Play along . If you post pictures of your 3 years old nephew at your cousin’s barbeque party, you have not much to worry about. Besides a few polite likes from your relatives, not much will happen to that image and it will soon be forgotten along with the other 10 million images uploaded to Facebook in a month. However, if you post the only image of a plane crash landing on the Hudson river, well, get ready for it to be grabbed and spread around.

Here is the irony. Photographers or photo agencies will post their images on social network sites in order for them to be seen, appreciated and dare we say it, shared ( ouch). Isn’t it the intended purpose of posting these images that they will end up in front of the eyes of a wealthy photo editor who will either purchase it or hire you ? And since you do not know him yet, the only path is via friends of friends re-posting it ? Should they all ask you for permission and pay you a license fee every time they do ? In other words, you give them something to share but you don’t want them to share.

Well then, quite a paradox . Ownership of an image doesn’t lie solely in managing its usage. It is also embedded in it. If you have a style, a talent, a point of view and an identity, your image will always speak your name, credit or no credit. Better yet, people who see your images will want to track you down in order to find out who is the talent behind those photograph. If they don’t, well, that’s because you failed as a photographer.

So what should you do with all these rights grabbing, soulless TOS that you keep on facing every day? Adapt.

They are not going to change because they are at the core of how these social networks make money. Not so much by licensing your images, obviously ( everyone knows there is no money there), but by using them to grow their network and thus selling more people to advertisers. And for that, they need the right to do what they damn well like with your images. Forever.

Keep that in mind next time you post images on any of these sites ( and others).  Your choices :

- Do not upload images

- Watermark your images

- Upload only images you are ready to give away

Either way, stop bitching and moaning about a new TOS like there was anything you could do about it. Although it might feel like it sometimes, it is not your platform, it’s theirs. They will do whatever they think is appropriate to generate revenue from it . They don’t owe you anything, you do.

So stop wasting your energy and time . Get back on your saddle and figure out  how you too can benefit from their services intelligently without loosing your pants and shoes ( and your sanity). Eventually the ecosystem will find a balance.

Posted in technology, Tweet, Social Media, Waste of time, digg, license, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, transaction | Print | 1 Comment »

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 »

January 22, 2008 by pmelcher.

This is what you get when you mix the talent of Brian Storm and his team and the incredible dedication and eyesight of Marcus Bleasdale, new member of VII photo agency :

If only everyone had a camera…with a conscience. Like Marcus.

Posted in digg, magazine, focus, lens, mediastorm, multimedia, editorial, slideshow, wire service, photojournalism, news | Print | No Comments »

January 11, 2008 by pmelcher.

A funny thing happened recently. One of the top microstock agency, Dreamstime, has decided to lift part of the veil on sales data. As an additional tool given to their contributor, they are now showing what keyword generated a download, thus a sale, of their image.

It is a great tool for contributors, albeit a double edge one. One could be tempted to use it for “keyword spamming”, the art of putting the wrong keyword to an image, in the hopes it will be seen, and eventually bought. A plague for microstock platforms. But what is new and challenging is Dreamstime decision to share part of its sales data.

The history of photo agencies and most recently sales platform has always been the opposite. In order to keep contributors with them, no one shared valuable sales data. It was, and is, proprietary information. A bit like enslaving someone by depriving him of knowledge. Getty, Corbis or JupiterImages, along many, many others would never dare make such a move for fear that their contributors would use that information to feed someone else, such as the competitions’ image database. And that will happen to Dreamstime, since exclusive contributors are maybe around 10% of their pool.

In a slide and phone world, that would have been quasi impossible . Requests for images did not come in the form of one or a sequence of one words. Thus photo agencies would have had a very hard time sharing that information. With websites, all this is different, obviously. But it still remains a very well guarded secret.

The real question is how is this useful ? Well, for one, it will bring a succesful microshooter valuable data on what types of keywords are entered for search. And which ones are the most entered and referred to their images. It will not, however, give a full picture. And that can be highly deceiving. It is not because I sold 100 images thanks to the keyword “butterfly” that this keyword is the most used in searches. It just probably means that I have the most relevant images of butterflies. Since it will not give all keywords, it will not help putting keywords you forgot to put in. For example, if my specialty is photographing fruits and I systematically forgot to put the keyword “fresh”, it will not show me how many sales I missed, if any.

Contributors reaction to this tool has been overwhelming positive and I command Dreamstime for making this available. It is a gutsy move to give photographers access to their sales data. It might, or will, force other microstock companies to do the same. Eventually, it might even force traditional agencies to follow and share more of their information. Their is a value for photographers to be less blind to the markets demand, while there is danger in using past sales to predict or influence future sales. It is not because a keyword has done well in the past that it will do well in the future and the risk is having more of the same image ad nausea. But this is more in a trend that is seeing more power given to photographers. And that is a good thing.

ON a completely unrelated note : Digg.com labs has released a image visual tool which allows to see, real time, what images are being voted. It has no practical usage that I can see but yet is very interesting.

Posted in Search, IPTC, Jupiter, digg, technology, keyword, web 2.0, getty, Royalty free, corbis, filter, prosumer, Microstock | Print | 4 Comments »

December 4, 2007 by pmelcher.

Social bookmarking website Digg.com has just launched, last night, an addition to their service. From now on, registered users will be able to submit images. For those unfamiliar with Digg, let me explain. You see an article you like, you submitt to Digg. If others like it, they also “Digg” it. The more Diggs, the more the article reaches the top. On the other side, a lot of people will go to Digg.com and read the most popular article.

What is very interesting here, is that it is now possible with images, creating the first social bookmarking of images. Why is this relevant to our industry ? Digg is a highly popular website, at least in the USA. It has a huge amount of traffic. This will allow us to see what images are the most popular. But with a twist.

The images that will appear to the top will be the images that most people find interesting to share, not to be confused with the ones they like the most. It is more likely that we will see more strange, funny, exotic images than groundbreaking photojournalism . But nevertheless, for advertisers looking to find the next viral marketing campaign, or publishers, seeking to populate their pages with eye grabbing content, it will certainly be a source of inspiration. For photographers too, it could become a source of inspiration.

Furthermore, it will be much different than a Flickr or other photo file sharing platform as the majority of voters will be not interested in photography. Finally, it will also be fascinating to see how many photo agencies, including the microstocks, will add the “digg” buttons under every single of their image.

With the crest of the web interaction at its peak, it will be a very compelling destination to monitor regularly for anyone curious about the relationship of photography and its users.

On a parallel note, and the second newsworthy item, is that Digg selected Idee Inc technology to prevent having duplicates. Thanks to Idee, if people vote for the same image but seen on different sites, it will add up instead of duplicating. A confirmation that the company has a real dedication to its core competence and not venturing into doubtful activities.

you can see Digg Images here Be prepare to see a lot of images of Cats and Dogs…

Idee Inc new website can be seen here. Check out their lab. very cool stuff

Posted in digg, idee, Search, flickr, news, photojournalism, Microstock | Print | No Comments »