Another archiving/marketing resource for Independent Photographers

Anybody know anything about this facility? I had a quick look. It’s reasonably priced for sure but is it any threat to DR? I think not. Anyone have experience and sold work through it? Please tell us all. How about you Jethro?

Actually, I just saw some of your material there Jethro. Excellent feature.

I just heard of it last night, so thought I’d check out the trial. Throw up a folder of images and play a bit. Besides, for the cost of about one beer a month to hold 5000 jpg’s It seems worthy of further investigating. Digital Railroad is too costly for me at the moment.

It’s in Beta, so it might be a bit clunky as of yet, but my images loaded up very fast and seamlessly. I believe (but might be wrong) that it was just introduced to the public yesterday. The “virtual agency” concept is intriguing.

Thanks for the kind words.

I’ll join you there, I think. DR is expensive and out of my range of possibilities right now, what with the cost of data capable cell phone service and broadband etc. etc.. Let’s continue to compare notes about photoshelter.

This virtual agency thing is indeed intriguing, particularly if costs come down to the point where all you have to do is sacrifice a beer a month! But I have to say I am a little wary yet, only because the one thing lacking in all this is the Salesmanship that normally backs up a library of images. When I started out, I worked as a “researcher” whose job was basically to sell the images in the library. We would get calls all day long, and I would try to find images that fit the needs of the various editors who called. Plus, while I was putting the package together, I would try to convince them that the material was particularly interesting and suited their needs exactly. I was simultaneously acting as their search engine and a sort of barker: “step up, step up, get your images here!” My point is that photos dont sell themselves, and editors dont have time to wade through a host of images, even if improved search engines help them to do so. Course, it seems that agencies today have all cut back on staff and dont work so hard to sell from the library as they used to. In that case, the difference between keeping your photos in a virtual agency and a traditional one is not so great. Maybe over time things will progress to the point that these virtual agencies can supply a form of salesmanship that would help editors to make their choices.

Yes Jon, very valid point. The personal relationships that develop between an editor and an agency sales rep also offer something that a virtual agency might not have. But unfortunately, the world is getting more automated, and impersonal. The glue that keeps us together is thinning. The next generation of editors and sales reps will have been raised in a world of instant messaging, atm machines, pay at the pump gas stations, and self serve digital printing kiosks.. All convenient tools, but tools that have completely taken over the way we as humans operate and interact. This truly saddens me. Though there is nothing stopping ten shooters from getting together, using this “virtual agency” technology to construct a very inexpensive, updatable archive, and collectively hiring someone like you (or your former self) to go be a barker for them.

Agencies still have the ability to sell a photographer for assignment work, as well as offer a syndicated product that might go under a little more scrutiny (ethically speaking) than some random “virtual agency” at a random dotcom address. So I would assume that this is how the agencies will stay in business (that and some grainy cellphone camera shots of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie canoodling) But the world and technology are moving so damn fast that who knows what will happen.

Since the future is so unknown, I will keep an eye on these emerging technologies. I will not drop the relationship with my agency (I like them a lot, and they’re undemanding and patient with me), but I have a shitload of images that aren’t newsworthy that could potentially find a home in one of these self inflicted image dumps. I don’t produce enough medium format, strategically directed, commercial stuff to warrant a stock (commercial) house relationship. And I sure as hell am not gonna put it up at istockphoto for one dollar per royalty free image. So, maybe I’ll play around with some with images from my personal archive, and the outs from the more commercial work I do, and see If it’s worthwhile.

Jethro can you report back on how this works since you are already involved….does it have good organizational tools, ie can you file stuff in categories?

Yeah i would be interested too in hearing from you, Jethro, and possibly other LS members who are currently using Photo Shelter and/or Digital Railroad. Might be nice to get a consensus.

I like Digital Railroad’s features but it seems a bit “closed” in that it doesn’t bring the photographers together……I think thats short-sighted, and its something I told the developers straight-on. Its pricing also may be unrealistic given todays documentary market, which sucks…..obviously. I wantto stick with it but my credit card may say something else shortly. :)

So Jethro, we are all waiting on your report :)

I just signed up and read all the stuff. These guys know their stuff and it seems well set up. This is good exposure. I hope many more lightstalkers try it out. It would certainly give it some clout since there are many editors here at LS. Go here [PHOTOSHELTER];www.photoshelter.com and remember it’s in its earliest stages.

Sorry for the delayed response guys. My two year old, the summer weather, and some cheap rum have kept me off the machine today.

My messing about with the photoshelter site has been limited as of yet. It seems like the archiving abilities are endless if you want to pay. I’m leary about about that proposition as a sole means of archiving just for the probability that they will eventually be bought out by yahoo or some other impersonal entity (some of the primaries created hotjobs.com and sold it to yahoo) and there is the potential that prices could rise to the point of ransom. Not nescessarily, but the possibility is always there. As a redundancy to dvd’s, it’s a nice option.

Now I’m a frightened little moron when it comes to computing stuff, but here goes my explanation attempt anyway.

It seems like you organize images into “albums” which you maintain as private. Then you can have 3 public “galleries” and 5 sub galleries, which can be made up of one or multiple albums. These public galleries have a feature image (your choice) that supposedly get rotated through the home page for exposure. You can also create what they call “packages” which (from what I can tell) seems like a method of setting up additional galleries that will only be available to persons you invite. Anything “public”, can be found via a search function that utliizes keywords and captions. For buyers, they have a basic search, as well as a detailed one. ie. between date x and date y, horizontal vs. vert, location, yada, yada, yada… The one batch of images I put up loaded pretty fast using their “uploader” tool, and the search function seemed flawless, though I was only playing with the variables of 20 images.

The agency thing is additional $50 start up, then $5 per member per month additional. I don’t know how this works at all yet. But it is one of the more promising aspects in my mind.

The direct sales thing requires a credit card merchant set up (third party) which they say is about $100 start up and 2-3% per transaction. A 2-3% percent vig is standard, and why retail stores often require a minimum purchase with a credit card. They (ps) will implement this credit card sale thing for free, but charge $1 per transaction thereafter. They don’t use the term license as opposed to sale, and I think they’re more geared towards event (wedding/sports/etc…) and royalty free stock photographers to put up images that can be downloaded and printed by clients. But I don’t know for sure.

It’s really in the beta stage, and I think they are looking for suggestions on how to improve it, and set a course for the direction it may take. For one, it doesn’t seem to have a list of shooters on it that can be found by name, location, speciality, etc…

You can try it for free for 7 days. Give it a whirl, interact here, offer input to the PoSh (will that work for a shorter name to type. I figured PS was already taken, and I think it’s a funny word?) folks (alpha-type entrepeneurial hotshots is probably more appropriate), and let’s see if we can make it work for us. Paul is absolutely right about the clout thing though (Digital Railroad has some pretty hi-liner individuals and organizations on board, and they seem to be marketing themselves on that premise). If PoSh becomes the site of little league game shooters, editors might be less likely to go there. But if some respectable work comes out of there, it will catch on with the buyers. Even if not, they’re talking about website integration in the coming months, a link from the url to a shopping cart for a reasonable cost would be pretty bitchen’ in itself.

I hope I was able to help. I really haven’t futzed with it enough yet to offer a complete summary, and I do have a tendency to ramble on and use lot’s of parenthesis.

I, for one, enjoy your ramblings Jethro. Cheers.

I signed up for a Photoshelter account. I know it’s in it’s infancy, but these guys are on the ball with tech support. Everytime I shoot them an email, it gets answered toots sweet.I like the looks of the virtual agency. On top of it the search engine and agllery formats are pretty sweet.

Fast uploads, batch captioning, online selling, it has almost everything you could think of. Well RSS feeds would be nice, but I am told that’s on it’s way.

As Jon said for the price of a beer, you get the same amount of storage space as the basic Digital Railroad.

Thanks Jethro, very informative. I wonder, instead of a credit card, is there an option for payment via PayPal, which is more and more becoming a standard means of paying people, and works pretty neatly. I hate credit cards and credit card companies and try to avoid them whenever possible. Paypal has its drawbacks too, but I am used to it now after ebay.

DG definitely has the heavy hitters right now, but you are right to hope that PoSh could still compete. Editors are used to looking in more than one place for material, and everything is still new and chaotic, so there is always a good chance that the little guys can compete. I am all for the underdogs. Hear us growl.

Photoshelter is evolving rapidly. It was excellent to start with, and they are willing to listen and make necessary changes to make it even better. The tech support is terrific.

Using photoshelter is very intuitive, even with the large number of available options and features your learning curve is small.

The storage is inexpensive and the networking options unlimited.

I have not used Digital Railroad so I can not compare the two.

I am totally sold on Photoshelter.

but anyone has sold something with DRR?
and with PS?

I think its actually great that there are two players in this field.

I am with Digital Railroad and I have been adament about telling Evan what kind of features I want to see in the future……I can tell you this flat out, if you are working assignments and need to edit and move your images to multiple sources this is a great tool. and very much undervalued.

For a group of photographers it also offers tremendous possibilities to pool resources and operate as a mini-agency…….they have just recieved 5 million in venture capitol which means that in a year they will have a lot more to offer than they do now, which is substantial, IMO.

It would also be a tremendous tool for group projects, ie if 50 photographers wanted to work on a cooperative project, which I am very much about.

Either way, DR or PS, we need to utilize both the flexibility of these tools to create work that will push the photographic envelope.

Just as an aside, between LS and DR, I am going to get a way to feature your work. I am working toward that goal, so hopefully we will have something soon to enhance both these tools.

I got to pump the guys at Photo Shelter. If you make a suggestion to them, they usually get it done.



By the way Vittorio, I made my first sale from sending a lightbox out for a story request. After the request for the pictures came. I just gave the client acess to download the images.

Keith, I think he meant an unsolicited request, ie, where someone found your work through the application engine or a service connected to it, as a stock agency might.

I think they have that in the works. It’s only been up for a few weeks, but they are steadily getting the word out. As it is right now, if you make your pictures publicly searchable, someone looking at the photoshelter home page can do a search that will go through every picture that is searchable on their engine. So if you type in a keyword, like "Kabul" for instance it will display all of the pictures that have that in keyword.

thenk you for your precious information.
I’ll try PS, too much expensive for the moment DRR

looks like this thread has gone untouched for some time…

does anyone who has been using PS have anything (positive/negative) that they can say about it?

In the last two weeks I used the private archive feature with a client.

I scanned the images and uploaded small files for my client to select their finals. Then I uploaded files for the web in one folder and set-up another folder for print size images, all private. They seemed to like the ability to look at it online and be able to download them at their convenience. I stayed at home, didn’t have to go into their office, didn’t have to burn any disks, but it took about 30-40 minutes each time I uploaded a 22 Mb file, my upload speed is to low obviously. The downloads are quick.

So far I like it. If I can do this with other clients I’m happy. Of course, the bad part is they didn’t actually see the georgous oringinal 4×5 transparencies. On the other hand a lot of folks don’t even know when they look at something beautiful, they need to see it printed.

Now the bad part is, that I had to buy a dvd burner because the full size scans are 420 MB and that would probably take me a week to upload. Since it would take a dozen cd’s I went the dvd route. When I drop the dvd off I get my balance check right away and have some more interaction with them. I’m also giving them a big test print to show them how good the scans are they paid for compared to the way they did it before. If I’m lucky I will be getting an order for prints as well.

Allen and the gang at photoshelter are very quick to respond to all my questions and suggestions, always trying to solve any problems. Allen is on LS as well.

The rss feeds work. Unless someone downloads a preview you basically have no idea who is looking at your stuff. The invite feature is great and very useful, since you can decide where you direct the viewers to. I think you should try it out. I shoot film and it takes a while to upload new stuff, but it helps me with editing and going through the film I haven’t touched in a while. Some of my work is sitiing in private folders for the moment someone asks for it and as a backup. The PR is picking up and I’m sure the gap between DRR and PS is getting smaller. Who knows, maybe they will merge one day. I just hope they don’t sell out to Getty or Microsoft for a gazillion bucks in the near future.

Here is the link to my gallery

Right away I made new business card with the link and I promote it in my emails, cards and there’s a special link on my website, where clients can search directly from my site and are redirected to photoshelter. Provided by PS and it’s sweeeet.

Enough praising for now.

In the last two weeks I used the private archive feature with a client.

I scanned the images and uploaded small files for my client to select their finals. Then I uploaded files for the web in one folder and set-up another folder for print size images, all private. They seemed to like the ability to look at it online and be able to download them at their convenience. I stayed at home, didn’t have to go into their office, didn’t have to burn any disks, but it took about 30-40 minutes each time I uploaded a 22 Mb file, my upload speed is to low obviously. The downloads are quick.

So far I like it. If I can do this with other clients I’m happy. Of course, the bad part is they didn’t actually see the georgous oringinal 4×5 transparencies. On the other hand a lot of folks don’t even know when they look at something beautiful, they need to see it printed.

Now the bad part is, that I had to buy a dvd burner because the full size scans are 420 MB and that would probably take me a week to upload. Since it would take a dozen cd’s I went the dvd route. When I drop the dvd off I get my balance check right away and have some more interaction with them. I’m also giving them a big test print to show them how good the scans are they paid for compared to the way they did it before. If I’m lucky I will be getting an order for prints as well.

Allen and the gang at photoshelter are very quick to respond to all my questions and suggestions, always trying to solve any problems. Allen is on LS as well.

The rss feeds work. Unless someone downloads a preview you basically have no idea who is looking at your stuff. The invite feature is great and very useful, since you can decide where you direct the viewers to. I think you should try it out. I shoot film and it takes a while to upload new stuff, but it helps me with editing and going through the film I haven’t touched in a while. Some of my work is sitiing in private folders for the moment someone asks for it and as a backup. The PR is picking up and I’m sure the gap between DRR and PS is getting smaller. Who knows, maybe they will merge one day. I just hope they don’t sell out to Getty or Microsoft for a gazillion bucks in the near future.

Here is the link to my gallery

Right away I made new business card with the link and I promote it in my emails, cards and there’s a special link on my website, where clients can search directly from my site and are redirected to photoshelter. Provided by PS and it’s sweeeet.

Enough praising for now.