DRR Marketplace

Hello Christopher,

Yes, The Marketplace is currently in development, along with e-commerce features for individual archives. We continue to refine these features and look forward to launching them to benefit our members and buyers around the world.

We encourage members to start preparing their images for The Marketplace. With that goal in mind, we released powerful metadata editing tools earlier this year. Advanced batch captioning features allow members to easily caption and keyword their photos. Members can add, remove, and “find and replace” metadata across large groups of images. Proper captions and keywords ensure that images will be more readily found once the Marketplace is launched.

Stay tuned for more specifics as we get closer to the coming release dates.

Best Regards,

Scott
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Scott Braut
Senior Director of Products
Digital Railroad, Inc.
1-845-821-6206
scott (at) digitalrailroad.net

Yeah, the marketplace been ‘under development’ for quite some time now. Bearing in mind that I wasn’t necessarily interested in a solo archive, I purchased a year of DRR last winter in anticipation, and prepared my images. I now have an archive with PhotoShelter, which seems to have unlocked the mysteries of e-commerce and a universal search/marketplace function for a very fair price.

I don’t mean to be snide, and it’s not directed at you Scott. But I did feel a bit like a sucker. Maybe it was my own fault. I don’t remember the exact language on your website, but it sure sounded like an early 2006 release. When it wasn’t, and I tried to followup, the normally personable DRR response kind of felt a bit more like an answering machine: ‘the marketplace is indeed under development, please continue to hold…’

I can tell you I’ve discussed this issue with colleagues, we came to the conclusion that there was probably no technical reason why the marketplace wasn’t up and running. That it was more what to do about agencies who may or may not want a level search field with Joe Blow. True or not, when these things drag out the scuttlebutt starts.

As far as PS vs DRR in general, I have to say I’m very happy with PhotoShelter. In my opinion, the only difference, which seems to be narrowing, is the who’s who cachet of DRR’s photo-j directory.

Bill

Scott

Can DRR be set up to extract and use existing,embedded caption and keyword metadata on images that are uploaded into ones DRR archive?

Bill, you are correct – last year the release date was pegged on the DRR site as ‘earlier 2006’. T.

I’m sticking with Nikon but moving over to Photoshelter.

Hello Bill,

Thanks for the note. As you can imagine, “e-commerce” and “The Marketplace” are actually comprised of dozens of major features, touching everything from search, image permissions, credit card processing to sales reporting. We have a very close relationship with our community and members — and we’re wholly committed to these features — so we try to communicate our intentions as early as possible so that members know what to expect and can prepare.

This may be part of the reason why the response you received felt so generic. Sorry about that — the only thing worse than communicating a broad date is communicating the wrong date. As you noted, however, we make every effort to engage our membership personally and in a personable fashion, and we endeavor to give everyone a “heads up” on what’s coming.

In terms of agencies — many agencies and prominent photographers are enthusiastic about participating in the Marketplace. We welcome all types of users equally and our underlying mission is to give people the freedom of choice. The Marketplace has always been in high demand.

There’s some conceptual overlap between our offering and Photoshelter’s, but many individual features are different. That will likely continue to be the case as each of our services grows. Since these differences are spread over dozens (or hundreds) of features, we typically suggest that people contact us for a demonstration of our services.

I’m always available along with the support and sales teams for questions.

Best,

Scott
-——————————————————-
Scott Braut
Senior Director of Products
Digital Railroad, Inc.
1-845-821-6206 (cell)
scott (at) digitalrailroad.net

Hello Mark,

Yes. We support all of the major (standard) IPTC fields, and our help documentation shows how those fields map to image editing software and our application.

As mentioned earlier, we released batch metadata tools earlier this year, with the goal of simplifying many cumbersome metadata tasks. Need to add a single keyword to 20 images? You can simply append it. Want to add a leading headline to a caption? You can insert metadata at the beginning OR the end of a field. Need to find and replace a credit? That can be done as well. Want to clear a single field on 100 images? That’s also possible. The application will even “intelligently” clean up extraneous spaces for you when removing metadata might leave an awkward result.

Again, this tends to get into the finer details of the application, so feel free to contact us with questions.

Best,
Scott

New York, NY, October 18, 2005. Digital Railroad, Inc. (http://www.digitalrailroad.net), the leading provider of Web-based application services for the professional photography industry, today announced plans for the Digital Railroad Marketplace.

As someone that has waited since ‘earlier 2006’ I have to say I expected the Global Market Place to be launched much earlier than this. It would appear that the ‘Promise’ of this feature was a little premature. Not great service!

“it was more what to do about agencies who may or may not want a level search field with Joe Blow” oh crap, if this is true, then it’s back to square one and there is even less point to pay money for either of these services….

Kenneth, let me be clear that that is purely speculation, fed in part by being peeved. But it seems logical to wonder.

Scott, with all respect, your response manages somehow to be both perfectly fair and slippery at the same time.

Seems like the same dance – you never quite come out and say ‘we promised [sort of] a date that turned out to be premature, here’s why it’s taking so long’. Other than allusions to the complexity of it all. I guess my problem is that the marketplace went from ‘early 2006’ to essentially ‘sometime this year, maybe’ with a kind of poker-face stance, as if all had never been otherwise.

Also, I’m a little confused why announcing ‘intentions’ so far in advance would be such a help for existing members to ‘prepare’… what, psychologically? Double-check those keywords? PhotoShelter tends to communicate things they’ve already done.

Bill

Yes I agree, waiting is equal to frustration, especially when bills are coming in (only).
Hovewer DRR is Great (we have do admit it!) DRR let you to protect-organize-distribute your work, and it is not just a company that is trying to promote a ‘temporary’ business, but a functional & established platform to work with – for photographers & editors.
And we do know that it takes time to build solid bases – for all of us.