Photoshelter Collection

That’s good news!

Is anyone making money selling their pics as stock on Photoshelter yet?

Andrew, it has just been launched. It’s still in beta. It goes live in November to the picture buying market. It went live yesterday to the potential contributing photographers. The advertising promo campaign only begins in 2008 so no sales. Looks great though. I just uploaded my first ten (initial exploratory max) yesterday and it’s a great system. I’m beside myself with excitement, quite frankly.

I thhink it will make a really fantastic collection, and so much less work than Alamy!
Although Alamy is a sure value right now for editorial imagery.

In principle, Photoshelter as configured mostly as an archive allows selling their photos as stock, so it is a legitimate question to ask if anyone has been making moeny from stock sale at Photoshelter.

As I have tried to promote ourselves through the Photoshelter list,
I’ve found the sheltering feature of photos at PS is a barrier.

They must have realized that you need to configure a stock agency. Unlike a typical agency, Photoshelter Collection features a forum among those participating. I would be interested how that will work to its advantage.

Paul, did you go to the town meeting on Friday? Did they mention anything about this? At the Photoshelter website itself, it was first announced yesterday. I saw it when I checked the PS site yesterday.

I am playing around with the beta – uploading and keywording images. The system they have created is impressive and I have high hopes!!!

There are many features that I could go on about but the two that strike me right away are the keywording system which is very well implemented and the fact that you don’t have to pay to play – as in you don’t have to have a Photoshelter account to participate in the Collection….so anyone that has not previously signed up with PS can still benefit from this sales platform.

I’ll tell you what I think is a barrier to sales with Photoshelter: it’s appearance. The thumbnails are too small, information on the files is hard to get at (pixel dimension etc) and that white background just about kills the images. For the life of me, I can’t fathom this choice – everybody knows that a mid grey is the best … DRR’s default layout is much better. I know you can customize Photoshelter but I’m still trying to understand their tutorials (and wondering if I can really be bothered to make the effort when it’s all so much more simple on DRR). Perhaps there is a simple solution to this that someone knows about? I also think that galleries load much faster on DRR. Yes, I’m thinking of switching…

David:

The Collection is a different “product” for lack of a better word and both the thumbnail and preview image display will be larger.

As for the aesthetic – everyone has their own taste – but I have to say that I don’t understand why you would opt for a generic template that looks like everyone else’s over a customized website?

I use a light gray background on my website and when looking at a preview
image all the info you mentioned is easily viewable.

http://www.photoshelter.com/c/axis5/gallery-img-show?G_ID=G0000gx1yho4O4uc&start=0&pagtotal=57

Hi David,

The PhotoShelter site you see today has the look of the PhotoShelter Personal Archive, and not the PhotoShelter Collection. The PhotoShelter Collection has been designed with photo buyers – everything from how search works, to how the collections are edited, to the design of the site (and the color of the background, the size of thumbnail and preview images, and other assorted goodies.)

Photo buyers have given us a ton of information over the past few years, and we’ve put it all to work in The PhotoShelter Collection.

We also don’t believe that photographers should be paying for things they don’t want or need – so there’s no requirement to have a PhotoShelter Personal Archive if you don’t need it. There’s no signup fee, no annual contract, no monthly fees. So there’s really nothing holding anyone back from getting in there and giving it a go.

— Grover

Jock:

You are right: your pages are much nearer to what I would like. I guess I will have to put more effort into understanding the customization and try to implement some changes for myself.
As far as the generic template goes, I suppose I just figure that if it’s good enough for VII or (now) Noor etc it’s good enough for me. Actually, I would much rather be out doing other things than trying to alter my archive’s appearance so perhaps I’m just lazy in this respect.

David – the point of a generic template is that you don’t need to learn a whole new interface when you’re a picture editor/buyer visiting DRR accounts. And if you sign up for one, you can sign in to them all.

Sure, your personal portfolio website needs to look different from the guy next to you. But navigating and buying images from your picture archive should be standardised and straight forward. I think the extent to which you want to customize DRR is so as to make your portfolio site and your DRR archive ‘blend’ together seamlessly.. and there are plenty of examples of how that works well (stacks of DRR archives do that – it cost me $US200 for them to implement the custom code into mine).

Paul

I think Andrews question regarding sales on Photoshelter has merit.

The lead story on StockAsylum (www.stockasylum.com) featuring the Photoshelter Collection announcement quotes two very interesting numbers.
1-PS provides services to 16,029 photographers. Impressive.
2-PS has 62,624 Registered Image Buyers. Very impressive

At a ratio of nearly 4 buyers to 1 photographer you’d think there would be some pretty decent sales :>))

Hi Mark. I agree, that question has merit.

Have you noticed that people are asking this question over and over and over again on this message board – and have been doing so for years now?

I can answer your question: Yes. There are some pretty decent sales going on within PhotoShelter.

Keep in mind that there are many different types of photographers using PhotoShelter, not just photojournalists. There are lots of print sales going on, in addition to the sale of stock images.

The big question that everyone always asks is if people are making stock sales from people they didn’t market to, and don’t know. In other words, complete strangers.

Again, the answer is yes.

Here’s a little story about one of them:

http://www.photoshelter.com/about/profile/snyder/

In fact, photo editors are working pretty hard searching in PhotoShelter. Considering the fact that they’re using the global search tool that simply searches all of the member archives (which is the “Wild West”, since nobody follows the same keywording standards) the results they can get back can be pretty raw. Yet, they’re still in there.

The PhotoShelter Collection will be a much different animal than the “wild west” global searches of the PhotoShelter Personal Archive. Since The PhotoShelter Collection has its own keywording system, controlled vocabulary, and photo editors rating the images, a photo buyer’s experience with it will involve much less work.

But, more importantly, as a photographer you will be able to see all of the sales statistics yourself – which means that people won’t have to ask that same question over and over again on this message board. You can just log in and look for yourself!

— Grover

Thanks for the response,Grover.

The link was interesting but,as a career stock photographer looking for a way to reduce my dependancy on traditional representations,it does little
to convince me of the potential of the system. It’s my career and,as such,hearing success stories relating to paying off ones annual archive expense
with a couple of months sales doesn’t provide the incentive that some of us ‘old schoolers’ need.

I realize,of course,that the PhotoShelter Collection will take things to an entirely different level and look forward to seeing how things unfold in
the coming months.You guys are definitely making some good decisions,in my view,and should be applauded for pushing the bar higher.