July 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

By now, you must have read all about the Getty Image/Flickr deal. In a nutshell, Flickr announced that Getty Images has the right to go through the Flickr collection and pick and choose the images that they want to distribute.

Now, seldom know that Flickr has been shopping around for the last two years for a way to license its content. They have approach many existing companies in order to investigate their options. I am not at liberty to say which but lets just say they are not your traditional mom and pops. But like with any huge company, time is not an issue and most potential, at first very excited, ended their conversations with a resentful puff and walking away with what everyone thought was a goldmine. When you looked closer, it is more like a coalmine. Lots of digging for little return. One huge issue, is that, although Flickr has a clear copyright policy, most people don’t care and upload whatever they want anyway. Since nothing is for sale, no copyright infringement lawsuit has ever surfaced, but most certainly a lot of “cease and desist” notices have circulated.

The second very important issue, is that Flickr has a beautiful facade, but behind it,  lies a dump yard of crappy snapshots. Their “Interrestingness” engine is a model of programming done with genius. Only the best images  surface, hiding the ugly muck below.

While these talks where going on, some mash up 2.0 companies tried to take advantage of Flickr’s API to lure users to shift platforms and take advantage of their licensing engines. That was a lost battle as Flickr monitored those links very closely and shut down  any one who  apparent motivation was money. No more than a little slap on the hand.

Getty, having a whole department in charge of making new deals could simply  not let go. These guys lose their job if they do not make any new deals. So they came out with this wackadoodle arrangement: Flick makes deal with Getty Images.

Wait a minute, Flickr doesn’t own, nor does it represent any of its content. It is only a sharing platform. How can they make a deal on behalf of their users ? They can advise them, yes, but certainly not make a deal for them. Getty will still have to ask each and everyone of them for permission to license their images. But be no fool, this has been going on for a long time. I do not know of any photo agency that has not already contacted users of Flick in order to represent their work. And those who didn’t are either fools  or not in the commercial stock business. This deal doesn’t change that, as Flickr cannot dictate anything to its users.

Furthermore only Getty, or its retarded companion Corbis, could afford such a deal. It will take them a huge time to edit through the content and find the pearls. And that is money spend, not received. Let’s say they do find a photographer with great talent, nothing guarantees them that he or she will sign up with them. Nothing at all. Or they have might have already signed with someone else. This is Gargantuan work for little return.

This deal is just a pack of hot air. We all know that Getty is no fool and that this is just a big PR balloon. It will fly, get some people very excited and overheated, and just disappear after a short sting.

What is however captivating is that Getty now officially announced, with this deal, that it can no longer trust its own suppliers or photographers with providing them with the right images. It is  also an admittance of the failure of both  their internal “creative research and intelligence” and in its long held belief that it had secured the right partnerships. To proactively and officially reach out to amateurs is sending a loud and clear message that their current content is not adapted anymore.

After thought : So what happens to those poor pro photographers schmucks who paid $50 dollars to get their images on Getty Images under the brand “Photographer’s Choice“? Let me get this straight : you’re an amateur and upload to Flickr, Getty images includes your images for free. You are a pro unwilling to upload to Flickr, maybe because you don’t want then stolen and you have to pay $50 per approve image ? It doesn’t compute

Posted in Search, license, technology, commercial stock, yahoo, web 2.0, corbis, finance, flickr, prosumer, getty | Print | No Comments »

June 26, 2008 by pmelcher.

I am a big fan of coops. Initially started in France, Magnum being the most famous one, Coops are small photo agencies created by a group of photographers who pool their resources in order to survive. Most do not last very long, because, along with the financial pressures, getting along amongst photographers with a lot of personality is not a easy task.

That’s what a coop is, really : a group of very individual individuals with a very strong ego. Thus internal fights and argument are quite frequent and explosive. Nevertheless, although very rare in the US ( VII being the exception), coops are striving in Europe. Not just France, but Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden and Italy. You have to have that socialist edge to create or be part of a coop, not really an American thing.

Photographers who belong to those coop have complete editorial freedom and shoot what they want, when they want.It is not always favorable to great business, but it allows for genuine photography. And that is where they are very strong. Far from the hard news already covered by countless wire services and photo agencies, Coop photographers tend to cover the unexpected and forgotten. In a industry now only obsessed by speed, they take their time. They do not produce much or fast and sometimes tend to over think their images. But nevertheless, you might be surprised. very surprised.

PictureTank, the Coop of Coops, or rather a platform that allows for different agencies to pool their images in one place, is a great way to discover and follow the work of many photographers. Presented in full sets rather than single images, it displays the story the way they were meant to be shown. It carries a full respect for the photographers work.

These agencies are not affected by Getty or microstocks. Not even Britney Spears worries them as they all seem to have made a vow of poverty. They understand that the path they have taken will not lead them to stardom or richness ( material, that is), but like priests of a Godless church, they have decided to devote their lives to photography. They cannot be touched because their world is not made of nice cars and expensive restaurants. They care about their work and nothing else.

Not all are good, far from it. You probably have the same ratio of good to bad than anywhere else. Some are helplessly useless while others shine like diamonds. No surprises here.

At a time when photography is all about numbers, dollars and no sense, where photo magazines worry about a supermodel’s ass while others are proud of their scatological content, where  Alain Meckler admits failure even in trade shows production and Corbis remains hopelessly in the red, it is good to see some fresh production.

Posted in photojournalism, Search, magazine, Magnum, wire service, slideshow, getty, corbis, france, editorial, Microstock | Print | 2 Comments »

June 17, 2008 by pmelcher.

- A useful blog. With some delay but with quite a bang, Photoshelter finally launches a very useful blog for its users and beyond. Full of tips, info, rules and dynamism, it could very well become a very helpful resources for stock photographers who take photography seriously. Does that mean they plan to close the other useless egg hugging blog who rips off hundreds of valuable images for free under the cover of ‘fair use” ? Go ahead, shoot that blog

more on School of Stock here:

- Multimedia continues to rule : Ed Kashi  has launched a wonderful website entirely dedicated to his work on Nigeria delta. Curse of the black gold, offers, among other option, a great multimedia who has all the attributes of a Mediastorm production. A must see, keeping in mind that Kashi was briefly captured and jailed to bring this issue to the world.

Multimedia here:

Update : June 19, 2008 : this article on MSNBC :

Nigerian oil field shut after U.S. worker seized

- Geolocation without GPS: Geolocation is the ability to pinpoint the location, on a map, of where an image was taken. Carnegie Mellon University took millions of  already geographically tagged  images from Flickr as a tool to identify the location of an image, any image. Works a bit like this. You upload an image which compared to millions of Flickr set. By recognizing attributes, it can almost accurately find out, by itself, where the image was taken. Using the same principle, one can easily see how automated keywording could benefit from this crowdsourcing approach. More details here

- Getty’s latest set of numbers: Funny how no one noticed how the Wireimage brand took a huge beating after being purchased by Getty. According to Getty’s published number, Wireimage went from  + $ 3 million a quarter, to a few hundred thousands the next full quarters. What happen ? Did the Wireimage staff just stopped working ? Furthermore, PumpAudio seemed to have also fallen to zero revenue for two quarters after acquisition.

Posted in mediastorm, celebrity, technology, commercial stock, multimedia, Search, slideshow, flickr, web 2.0, keyword, getty | Print | No Comments »

May 27, 2008 by pmelcher.

Sometimes it is good to step out in order to better look in. In this 25 minutes video, Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, goes over image search, segmentation and other challenges that face anyone that is trying to built a better search.  What is interesting in this is how he speaks over and over about that its all about working with the data you have and not power coding. If you analyze the data you have ( data can be replaced by images, obviously) then you get a more agile platform.

In the case of photography, we tend to add more data ( think keywords) to an already huge set of information. We wrap data with more data, which never made sense. Google, TinEye, Riya and many other companies seem to have taken the lead in a area where photo agencies should have been the precursors. It is fascinating to see how many companies will sell you a Image Database management system that is really a keyword database management with images attached to them. None even use advance text search technology and let you suffer thought metada building on your own.

On the flip side, Image Buyers are still relying on a guessing game, trying to find the right image with a varied source of words. Very archaic, isn’t it?

Take a peak at the video here :

Posted in technology, Search, keyword, google, web 2.0 | Print | No Comments »

May 12, 2008 by pmelcher.

Once again, JupiterMedia has released its quarterly results. Once again they are they loosing money on the photo side ( JupiterImages). Out of the big three , Corbis, Jupiter and Getty, only one has posted profits. Corbis is notoriously a cash hungry beast with a huge appetite for cost while Jupiter seems to be on an ever growing decline. Only Getty Images has been able to pull off the acquisition/consolidation scheme. Not without hurting. No longer the aggressive growth company, it was brutally manhandled by Wall Street and had to retreat into the protective hands of an equity investment company that took it out of the public playground.

There is a lot of resentment inside Guetty these days. Photographers are unhappy : Commercial stock RM revenues are declining while there is too many celebrity photographers rubbing elbows at every event. Something has got to give and it will be a no surprise to see it reduce its snapper staff as soon as the public doors are closed. 2008 will not be a good year for the Getty staff in general.

However, what is causing these monopoly hungry corporation to fail ? A few things:

- No passion : Only Jonathan Klein seems to be passionate about photography. Do you ever see Jupiter’s CEO at any industry event ? or Corbis new CEO ? what about those A21 guys?  NEVER. They sell images like others sell socks: With a passionate disinterest. Like a bunch of accountants recently named CEO.

- A dry corporate culture. It takes dedication to take and license images. It is not a 9 to 5 job. Walk in at the office of any of these companies and you will see rows of cubicles populated by clock-watching workers spending more time surfing job sites then their own. Most of the staff in these photo factories are in a transition job, passionately looking for something else. The only passion you see, or feel, is the passion to get promoted before your colleague. Walk into small or medium agency and everyone is ready to cut their arm to make sure it will work.

- A fundamental misdirection:  Mark Getty has a long term plan that fits in a very long term perception of the world economy. The others just want to make money. Even Bill Gates’ plan was a bit more sophisticated than just making money. Money is what happens when your plan is succesful, not the opposite. I never heard Meckler or Schenk formulate a vision besides “we will be profitable one day”.

- A complete lack of risk taking: Corporation are all about control, prediction and risk management. Everything photography is not.  Spending fortunes on marketing is just not enough. You still need the content. But understanding what is the right content is not something so easily predictable. It is not, for example, because you purchase a successful brand that it will continue to be successful. Without taking risk there cannot be a succesful photo agency. Its all about being one step ahead of picture buyers who themselves are not sure where they are going before they get there.

One could continue on and on why these business structure are inadequate for the photography world. Everyone knows that Jupiter Images is for sale for lack of being successful. No one is foolish enough to believe that Corbis will ever be succesful with its current structure. They will only obtain profitability by downsizing and reducing themselves.  A21, we will not comment as its days are numbered. There is no surprises in these quarterly reports anymore and I doubt there will ever be anymore. The non performers are going to not performed as Getty Images will position itself to be acquired by one of the media giants such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft when these will realize that after owning the distribution channels they will need to control content. As Mark Getty very rightly said ” IP ( intellectual property)  is the oil of the 21th century”.

Posted in Search, Jupiter, celebrity, commercial stock, yahoo, google, getty, corbis, finance, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

May 9, 2008 by pmelcher.

First, I have to admit I have always been a big fan of everything that comes out of the Ideeplex in Toronto. These guys have the best image tracking system I have ever seen, PixId, already used by the top photo agencies in the world to save countless hours in their billing process. They have a visual search that is incomparable and might just be the secret weapon of the Alamy armada. They also have a color search that is the most proficient out there . You can see and play with all of them in their lab section. These guys are doing for photography what Einstein did for physics, making it progress by leaps and bounds. If you are not using one of Idee’s services these days, you  have a big problem.

So when Idee announced the beta version of their image search earlier this week, called TinEye, I could not wait to play with it. Premise is simple: Take an image that you either upload or find on a website and ask Tineye to  seek any place it is published. That would seem simple enough, but Tineye will also find that image, wether its been cropped, resized, re colored, twisted, bended, you name it. Even with major (and we are talking major) alteration, Tineye will find it. Alterations that would make a human eye miss it. Impressive. very impressive.

That image:

brought up this image, among many others:

Because it is still in Beta, the results are not impressive in numbers. They have only indexed half a billion images and are in the process of indexing the rest. Hey, Google was not built in one day either. If you live near Toronto, you probably can see the smoke coming out of the Ideeplex. It’s those server crunching data under the watchful eyes of master genius CTO Paul Bloore. Or could it be from CEO Leila Boujnane head, fuming with impatience because it is not finished yet ?

I played with many different types of images, using the cool Firefox plug in that lets you perform a search without leaving the site you are visiting.Hard to stop and I know I will continue to use it intensively.

So what it is good for ? Well, for one, speaking of Orphan Work, this image search engine that could will find all usage of an image, including, very certainly, the owner of the image.  It is going to much, much harder to claim that an image is orphan with this guy. But it can do much more. Think of all those micro and midstock  photographers who would love to see where their images have been used. Same with those CC happy Flickr members. Pro photographers will be able to keep a watchful eye over their agencies, as well as agencies can keep a watchful eye for unauthorized usage (Picscout, beware ).

There are many other potential for this free image search which suddenly puts google image into the medieval ages. And it will be a pleasure to watch and grow and mature. There is no doubt this will be one of the biggest success of the internet in recent years. Because people are fed up of searching for images with text. It just doesn’t make any sense. This is just the beginning of the end of keywording, the fall of the controlled vocabulary despotism.

Tineye returns exact matches, for the time being, and that is  maybe its most important shortcoming. It will return the same exact image and not similar. But knowing these guys, that will not last long, and the option to return images that look like the image you are using shouldn’t be that far.

If you have a chance, jump on this as soon as you can. They are taking suggestions and I am sure would love to hear your. It is time to make history . ( oh no, I sound like Obama now…)

Either way, these guys have a reputation: If it is not perfect, its not finished. So, do not expect them to open Tineye to the public before every little crumb of image is properly indexed.

Posted in idee, Canada, technology, copyright, license, editorial, web 2.0, Search, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

May 4, 2008 by pmelcher.

“The big winner in these data are Internet design and development firms, whose purchases dominate the industry. But while these firms consistently hold the highest market share, both in terms of dollars spent and units purchased, their average spending per image was often lower than that for other segments, particularly creatives. These dynamics can have strong implications for producers and marketers of stock imagery.”

TrendWatch Graphic Arts_2005_

That was 3 years ago. The $71.9 million revenue of Istockphoto in 2007 is a clear proof that this study was correct. It actually did not reveal any secret but confirmed what everyone already knew. So, how as the industry reacted in the last 3 years ?

- The conservatives: Most have continued in their all too familiar ways, producing the same images for the same pricing, even when 90% are now being sold at microstock prices. Voluntary ignoring the microstock noise, that has now grown from a chatter to a scream, they believe that it is just a passing fluke that will die down when the party is over. Some even take a stand against this market by claiming loud and clear that they will NEVER surrender to such pricing model. As if high-priced images had any appeal to any image buyers.  They have the same images available on mid and micro sites, yet priced according to antiquated models. They have capture the attention of the medium mediocre pro photographers whose very livelihood is threatened by this sudden price drop. As the protectors of the pricing “status quo” they stand up desperately like little toy store owners in front of K Mart refusing to sell cheap chinese toys while charging 6 times more for the same products.

- The cold feeters : They understand what the market is up too but have a hard time accepting it. They have been in this industry for a long time with reasonable success and hate seeing prices go down. So they adapt. They either create new collections for these markets or “retire” images and price them lower. One foot in the water, one on land, they think they can continue doing what they know best without loosing on new pricing trends. They enter with little careful steps as walking in the waters of a cold lake, trying to organically figure out its temperature and if they will be able to swim. These agencies confuse their photographers tremendously as revenues become unpredictable.

- The passionate: They can’t get enough. They were early-adopters and cannot wait to do more. Some have caught the wave at the right time and are seeing good results, while others waited and jumped both feet at the same time. They are leaving familiar pricing territories and well know clients for hit and run sales. Less tear sheets but more volume. Less marketing intelligence but more sales data. Some have created their own micro/mid platforms and are hoping to catch up on the Istock wave ( Tsunami ?).

What is fascinating is when you see a traditional RM/RF platform asking their contributors for more “regular business images: people at their desk, answering phones..” . It is also laughable when others stand up on their soap box and say: “The answer is easy, my friends, create more high end RM images”.

Huh ?

When I was at Corbis, the term was “cutting edge” and even back then I was hitting my head against the walls trying to figure out what it meant. And more important, how it is made.

A stock image is by nature an image that is made to please a wide variety of clients. Furthermore, it has to be unfinished so that text and logos can be added. Even other images copied and past into it. Even with our world turning into a global village, local sensitivities are at skin edge. It makes it very hard to create images that will please everyone in the world.

So what is high end RM images ? I would like to see. Because, like the Eldorado or Atlantis before, there is a lot of talk about it but not much to see : Behold the savior of photography, the almighty cutting edge, high end photograph. The secret knowledge that will lead to the golden caves of fortune: How to create a high end image. If you possess that wisdom, that elusive stone, the magic wang that transforms a low end / medium end image into that legendary 6 figure image, then why in the hell would you stick it in a photo agency that will take 50% or more of your sales ?

Most commercial stock photo agencies, right now, should give their salespeople a substantial raise. Because the major reason their sales are still stable, if not rising, is because their client stick with them. Mostly because they enjoy the help and friendship with their contacts there . Its not the pricing, nor the images, those can quite frankly be found elsewhere, its that person on the other side of the phone. Yet, most go on a search for the elusive “sharp, cutting edge, high end” imagery soon to be copied by extremely web savvy microstock shooter.

A good salesperson will tell you exactly what images you need because they sell them everyday. Its not going to be a creative research ( shoot RV people !!, especially the ones being pushed because people can’t afford the gas price, says Corbis ) or keyword search analysis. Not even past sales data. It is going to be these guys behind their screens and desks, day in and day out that can tell you what you need. And they also, have no idea what a cutting edge image is, but they sure do know what an image that sell can be.

Posted in Search, Midstock, license, commercial stock, keyword, finance, Royalty free, corbis, transaction, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

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 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 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 »