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 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 2, 2008 by pmelcher.

A new company emerged from unknown depth a few days ago, proposing free “automated” tagging, or keywording. Named Tagcow, the company does not explain how the tagging is done.

Curious, I decided to give it a spin with a couple of images including this image:

After two days, the image was finally tagged with two words: “Pool” , “Man”. I guess that is what you get for free. Furthermore, when I downloaded the image, I could not find the keywords anymore…There is nothing automated about this service. It is currently impossible for a computer to recognize  the content of an image. The most advanced systems I have seen have a 10% success rate, and then again with very contrasted and simple pictures. Tagcow uses a little known service offered by Amazon call the Mechanical Turk. With this service, anyone can put a long, painful task and offer to pay for human beings to fulfill them

“Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it”. At 0.01 cent a picture, one can get images keyworded for cheap. However, the quality is not guaranteed.

Thus it is the power of the masses used here, making more obvious why they picked a cow for their name. Not the brightest animal in the land

Posted in No sense, Search, copyright, IPTC, keyword, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, filter | Print | 2 Comments »

March 24, 2008 by pmelcher.

Apparently Picapp is having some hiccups. As per many posts in their forum, Picapp has been supplying non authorized images to bloggers worldwide for free.

Apparently Getty  was supposed to only put their wholly owned images via the Picapp service. That is images either produced by staff photographers or bought outright. But by some API fluck ( that is the official version, at least) images from commissioned photographers also appeared.

Apparently, the issue is currently being solved but if I were a Getty contributor, I would check if my images are made available. There filtering system does not seem to be very efficient. The most amusing part of all this?  Picapp is run by Picscout, an anti copyright infringement service. I guess you can’t trust anyone these day…

Posted in copyright, technology, license, filter, wire service, getty | Print | 1 Comment »

January 24, 2008 by pmelcher.

500,000 images stolen in 94 hours, resulting in a 17 gigabyte file, available, for free, as a Bittorrent download. Anyone wants to start a free photo agency ? Granted, the content might not be very interesting..

According to this article in Wired magazine, a hacker gained access to the private sites of Myspace users and retrieved password protected images.

” …DMaul, a denizen of the online forum TribalWar.com who declined to reveal his name, used an automated script to run nearly 44,000 MySpace user profiles through one of the ad-supported sites, MySpacePrivateProfile.com — a process he says took about 94 hours. He rolled those images into a single file and seeded it to The Pirate Bay, a popular BitTorrent tracking site, on Sunday, advertising it as “pictures taken exclusively from private profiles.”

Myspace, which is owned by Newscorp, knew apparently about this hole. But it makes you wonder. Is your website safe ? Do you know where your images are right now ? all of them ? Imagine if the same “incident” happened to a Getty or Corbis ? Or worse, to a microstock RF agency who would have an impossible time finding out if a usage is legitimate or not.

Posted in web 2.0, copyright, technology, filter, finance, Royalty free, getty, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

January 23, 2008 by pmelcher.

We are all getting fat. let’s face it, we are gaining weight and it doesn’t seem like it is going to change. When we were dealing with slides and prints, we needed to physically move. We needed to get up and get the images in drawers, got to a lightboxe, compare the images, put the slide in sleeves, and get them ready for a messenger to pick up. Depending on the size of the photo agency, the traffic department was either close by or a few flights of stairs away. Even photo editors had to be “on the move” as editing required a combination of many physical steps.

Today, from the moment  we sit down in front of our computer screens with a coffee and a bagel  (or anything that will serve as a breakfast), turn on our screens, we hardly move. With a combination of tools, from phone to browsers, we hardly have to move. Thus we are getting fat. I am sure if you look down at your midsection right now, you will see a sign that you are gaining some unneeded volume. We barely move to get to a conference room where we cautioulsy sit down again to listen or talk with our peers who are also gaining weight.

Starring at the glare of our screens for more than eight hours a day, switching from e mails to photographs, news websites to blogs, our eyes are also becoming weaker. Hard to find someone working in this business who doesn’t wear glasses. Although our eyes are our weapon of mass destruction, they are slowly declining on us , as we abuse them hours on.

And of course our skins are not looking better either. We barely see daylight anymore as we hardly have any reasons to be outside. Only photographers escape this doom fate, as they still need to move to create their art. They  are, however, still constrain to the  mischievous chair and screen combination while they caption, photoshop, upload their images for hours on.

And the future doesn’t look much better. As we get more and more wirelessly freed from our offices and work more from home, we might decide not to wash so frequently, let alone take care of our forever growing  hair. We might decide that eating three times a day is not enough, thus enjoying a permanent flux of food. We might not have any need to get out of bed that often as all our necessary tools of the trade may be at arms reach.

Paca, Cepic, Asmp, APA, SAA, PLus, ASPP and all other organizations should vote for a mandatory gym membership for all employees of our industry. We should lobby our respective governments to put in place salvation laws that would require a minimum of one hour of forced exercise to all those wishing to work in the photo industry . Finally, we should  put in place motivational points of interest in our offices in order to force more activities than just going to the bathroom.

Otherwise, my dear friends, we might become instinct before we get to see the full effect of Global Warming.

Posted in IPTC, magazine, technology, keyword, web 2.0, photoshop, filter, photojournalism, editorial | 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 »

January 5, 2008 by pmelcher.

The next big thing will be a photo agency that distributes all other photo agencies. And independent photographers. Think about it. When Getty Images entered this market, it was with the simple idea to aggregate the content of multiple photo agencies that they viewed as too disperse. To regroup into one location the content of many small agencies. To consolidate. At the time, the technology would not allow for any other model than to place this content into one giant server and index it. So Getty went about to acquire and combine.

With the advent of Google, we now know that this is no longer necessary. One can do a search over millions of websites from one location without hosting any of the content. Google Images shows us a glimpse of what could be done with photography. Instead of spending millions of dollars into content creation and hosting, a carefully crafted company would index the millions of licensable images worldwide and make them available for purchase from one location.

No need for hosting, acquisition, database management and everything else that is very costly. No editors, indexers, no imaging, none of all these costly human beings that complain a lot. Already Getty and Corbis have taken baby steps into this formidable market. Using the old model of a central server, they license material from agencies they have no control over. Mostly in Royalty free, but also in niche sectors. Science Faction or Minden Pictures are good examples. Corbis does same with EPA and others.

But on the horizon are coming very strong alternatives. Spffy from stockphotfinder.com creator Randy Taylor is one candidate while in Europe, Picturemaxx has already cornered the German market. Spffy is still very young and incomplete but is on the right track, while PictureMaxx only needs to be internationally adopted to dominate the market. Both have understood that you leave the content where it is but you make it simple and easy to find.

They are consolidating the industry without spending one penny on acquisition. The key, obviously, remains to build the appropriate search engine that will retrieve the right images from millions of potential candidates. Too many irrelevant results and the image buyers will leave. That is a huge challenge when you do not have control over the metadata who, furthermore, is in no way standardize.

There are ways to solve this which I will not discuss here. Acquisition will soon be an event of the past while distribution partnership will become more of the norm. Getty and Corbis will continue to try to position themselves as those unavoidable distributors, cutting as many exclusive deals as they can. Because the only way to beat such a system is to have an exclusive compelling content and refuse to be indexed.

Why is this a good thing? Well for once, smaller agencies ( in size and volume of images) will be able to compete at the same level. No longer will the pricing or heavy marketing be a decisive factor but rather the image quality. Since everyones image will be comparable to every one else’s, the competition will be more on image relevancy. If that is the exact image needed, then it will sell, regardless of its price or source.

It should makes the price war less relevant. It might destroy branding, which would become quite obsolete after a while, thus easing on the cost of marketing.

Finally, and depending on the politics and ethics of the winning company, create a mega photo agency that could reign as a despot over the industry or a  coop that would share sales data and keyword entries in order to increase the content relevancy.

At the end, as always, the customer, the image buyers will decide.

Posted in Search, IPTC, license, technology, picturemaxx, google, web 2.0, getty, corbis, filter, flickr, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

January 3, 2008 by pmelcher.

First there was the end of out of focus images. Thanks to autofocus lenses, it is now quite impossible to get a blurry image. You can, however, get the focus on the wrong object.  Now, this company out of California, is working on what they call Refocus Imaging. You can focus AFTER taking the image. Not only that, but you can play around with your depth of field. No need to play around with your aperture at shooting time.
It is still at an experimental level  and the quality is not great but once it is all said and done, one could easily have two or three versions of the same image with the focal point at different places.  The  The Digital Lens™ Platform is composed, for now, of a piece of hardware to mount on your camera and the proprietary software. It also, apparently, captures more light from the same shooting conditions by enhancing  current captors. Be prepared for more post processing time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it integrated in a camera in the next coming years.

see it for yourself 

Posted in lens, technology, focus, filter | Print | No Comments »

January 2, 2008 by pmelcher.

This video has surfaced on some blogs recently. Besides the fact that it is a brilliant presentation done by a man who certainly has incredible talent at public speaking, one should be aware that Larry lessing is not only chairs Creative Commons but is also founder of the Center For Internet and Society. ( A strong advocate for extended Fair use laws)

Look at this 20 minutes video and continue reading below:

Impressive, isn’t ? Makes you almost want to give away all your images in order to help your kids not become criminals. Like every well founded argumentation, it mixes emotions and feelings with what seems to be high level intellectual thoughts to make a point. Very sophistic. That point being that some content should be free to use for creative remixing.

Let’s analyze a bit. Lessing uses three very well done ( and funny, because that certainly helps put your guards down) video to demonstrate his point. If you have ever spend a little time on YouTube or other equivalent site, you would immediately know these are rare exceptions and not the rule. Furthermore, while very entertaining, no one really knows the purpose of these videos. Is this art ? are they fundamental to the existence of our society ? If they had never been made, would we miss them ? Lessing makes it sound like they are and should be.
His point is that copyright owners should be more open to sharing ( that means free), in order to let our kids create whole new content, “learn to sing again”, has he puts it.
Create yes, remix, yes, share their with friends, why not ? But make it public to the world ? mmm, why ? What is the benefit for the photographer when not even a credit is mentioned?
What is the reason behind this video ? Well, simple. For more people to use Creative Commons scheme. Why ?
For one, to break and dissolve the communications between users and creator. There is absolutely no reason why someone who would like to use an image for free in a remix should not contact the owner of the image to ask for permission. It is called Common Courtesy. Creative Commons wants to replace that dialogs with their proprietary licensing model.
Why ? simple. They want to become the gateway for all licenses on the internet, including the paying ones. It is something I mentioned in a previous post. It is all about control.
Don’t take this wrong. I am all for sharing and helping creativity. I do not particularity like to give images for free but have done so and will continue as long as their is a compelling reason.
What I am against is the very wealthy and combative Creative Common and Electronic Frontier Foundation that are trying to take control of the raising mass of UGC by guiding them towards the belief that sharing is better than licensing.
With enough support from the masses, and with the help of the RIAA, they will be able to change the copyright laws with no input from professionals. It is not Getty, Corbis nor the microstock who are threatening your business these days, it these San Fransisco rich kids who are. They will be the ones who will force photographers and agencies to open up their archives for free internet sharing.I say, let’s re-introduce Common Courtesy in usage and have anyone who wish to use an image, even for free, simply ask for permission. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in prosumer, web 2.0, license, copyright, filter, editorial, corbis, news, law, getty | Print | No Comments »