“Alamy (just for example) checks for the required file size, noise and sharpness. And that’s it !!! They (usually) even don’t care about blown highlights, dark shadows, if the image is well litted, or if the image is ‘marketable’. They let their clients decide.”

Alamy also use their site technology and the customers to track the views of images so that they can filter out the non sellers so that people don’t see the less attractive images unless that’s what they are looking for. they do to a small extent filter images that are ’similar’ but they know that editors will want to choose subtly different images for their publication. I for one am sick of images being rejected for having blown highlights and too shallow DOF, and it’s not because I don’t know how to meter or set an appropriate aperture, i see identical style food photography used every day.

I was surprised that photoshelter did not make a viable business, but i don’t think they will be the last challenge to the royalty free collections of getty and corbis.

I think that PSC was so wrapped up and in love with the social aspects of Web 2.0 that they thought it was a business model. As a teenager in the 1960’s I can relate to “people power” and “we will change the world”, but that’s not good business and the money men pulled the plug on a group of latter day hippies.

The fact that they had 25,000 plus contributors demonstrates that they had a lot of weekend shooters, just like the Microstock sites, yet they weren’t charging Microstock prices. That’s the crux of the issue right there, PSC were trying to build a community and not a business.

- When I launched their website for the very first time I thought it’s just a community or another photo related portal, a video blog … or whatever and closed the site again. I did retry some days later, looking around a bit more and was finally able to find the entry for the agency…
A new client (image buyer) could have seen it in a similar way … and very often there is only ONE chance and in the world of www decisions are often done in seconds (to stay or surf away …
Why is Google (unfortunately) the ‘one and only’ nowadays ? Launch their site, it’s a big white blanket with just a search box. Launch one of the sites of it’s competitors (are there any?) and you get a portal with 1000 links and useless stuff, you’ll have to look around for a minute to locate the search box,etc …

- Next step I did was the initial submission of 5 images. After a week or so all 5 get the ‘approved’ stamp (wow) and I brought 4 of the images to life (for sale). Image number 5 did need a model release and I don’t like to upload and manage model/property releases – that’s micro stock behaviour. All other (macro)agencies I’m with (and have been with in history) do trust their contributors in that way. Even ‘big’ Alamy does.
However, I did study PSC’s rules about title, caption and read about their ‘tagonomy keyword thingo’.
When my images did say ‘hello world’ I tried to find them. But what a big surprise ! The PSC’s search engine was the worst one I’ve ever seen (sorry for that, but’s a fact)
- it mainly relied on the single keyword(s) only)…. ‘car woman’ did bring up my images. But ‘woman in car’ or ‘woman and car’ or ‘woman with car’ … no way.
Why ? .. because the terms ‘in, and, with, etc ‘ haven’t been keyworded (of course). Sorry, but even the most stupid search engine on the web doesn’t take such stop words into account. The way out would have been to include these words at least in the description field.
In addition, the tagonomy system did have it’s own mind and did make it’s own decision. Images with a woman driving a car I keyworded woman, car, driver, driving, etc.. Tagonomy decided to keep the word driver only … and a search ‘woman driving car’ didn’t bring up my image. Just some examples, there have been others ..

With a stock photo agency it’s ALL about the search engine. Buyer like to find images very quickly. To rely on single keywords (not phrases) is a bad way. An image buyer likes to narrow down the search and wouldn’t type in ‘woman car’. S/he would use:
’stylish single white mature caucasian woman 40 + blonde hair wearing a headscarf and driving in a bright red british convertible on vacation red lips with a big smile on her face and a pet dog in the backseat [RM, model release, dog release]‘ (kidding *smile)
Alamy (e.g) does show their contributors the phrases buyers do use. A good way to study. They are similar to the example above (a bit shorter *smile).
- And I’m not quite sure if it’s a good way to start a new agency and use the (high) prices of ‘foto quote’ AND let the contributors decide if they like to sell their images to the standard quotes, or higher or lower.
This way an image buyer is faced with different quotes for similar images … maybe a bit confusing ??? Maybe this doesn’t look very ’serious’ ?

- PSC did put a lot of work in the community. That’s ok, and for sure a reason why most contributors did love it and are very sad it’s gone now. But an agency isn’t a community and maybe it would have been better to invest in other thingos first (e.g. a workable search engine ?)

- Hiring Getty people sounds very good at a first glance. But Getty was always number 1 and they never had to ‘fight’ the market very much.
Maybe it would have been better idea to hire (at least as a consultant) a ‘hard core pro stocker’ like e.g. Dan Heller who did learn the biz the ‘hard way’.
………………………………..

Imho, one of the BIGGEST mistakes many agencies do: they like to be ‘wiser’ than their clients and try to ‘edit’ on their own.
That’s ok for a ’boutique style’ agency, but maybe not the best advice for a ‘general agency’.
Alamy (just for example) checks for the required file size, noise and sharpness. And that’s it !!! They (usually) even don’t care about blown highlights, dark shadows, if the image is well litted, or if the image is ‘marketable’. They let their clients decide.
Some agencies do show (to their contributors only) what sells each day (showing the image and the prices they got for it).
You would be surprised – really surprised – what sells !!! (most surprised are the photographers who did the images *smile).
90% of this imagery would never ever have made it on a microstock site (that’s very good!) nor on a ‘edited collection’. All these agencies have really, really great photos in their collection as well (and great photographers) … But I’ve never ever seen one of these great images selling – Never !

Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. Maybe pro-image (and educated) buyers like APE & co. do use the the boutiques. But I assume many buyers (one-man and small companies) just fire up their PCs and do surf the agencies. They don’t have the money for advertising agencies. Maybe they give an order to their secretary ‘Hey girlie, look out for an image for our new flyer’. And ‘girlie’ surfs around, finds an image that looks very nice to her. She isn’t an educated art buyer, no photographer by herself, she never have heard about image composition or blown highlight, or whatever … she just likes the image and hits the buy button …

- And who are the agency-people who do edit the images? Looking at 100’s or even 1000’s of images day by day?Pixelpeeping at 100% and have to decide (within a second or two) if is this image is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, marketable, and giving it an internal rank … maybe looking at a thumbnail only ?

- Like Andrew above I had the funniest rejections. ‘Editors’ who didn’t know the difference between noise and lens-bokeh … ’sorry, no editorial value’ rejections (for covershots) … rejections for ‘brand logos’ (statement: when increased to 600 % a logo ‘could’ be seen on the knob of a model’s jeans (I’m not kidding !) … lack of composition (for awarded images) and so on , and so on … sometimes very weird …

Microstock agencies are the worst of all ,they see things in images that aren’t even there … but that’s good, that allows tremendous sale potential for others

anyway ….

At least PSC tried to fight the market and that was good !!!

I just liked to use PSC as a ‘case study’ to indicate some points when looking for a new agencies.

But it’s just ONE opinion .. and as always your mileage may vary.
And I wouldn’t die for this ‘point of view’ – I could be wrong …

sorry .. a long one …
sorry for bad english too .. I’m not a native speaker

Best, Reini

I blame Allen and Grover too, although they made a valiant effort which deserves kudos. They were so wrapped up in the world of Flickr and Web 2.0 that they forgot that these are social models, not business ones. However, they treated photographers fairly and well and should be commended for that. I knew something was up months ago when my checks were (still) being signed by hand, by Allen. At that point they should have been so busy that he didn’t have time to write contributor’s checks.

I had rejects from PSC that were model released Lifestyle, which is a high demand category for most Agencies, because – get this, they were “too commercial”. Shoot! The Blog was mainly about art and not commerce. I can be as artsy fartsy as the next guy, but this was supposed to be a business for Pete’s sake. Commerce seemed to be too crass for PSC and they paid for it. They should have taken Deep Throat’s advice to Bob Woodward – “follow the money”

Like everyone else though, the sudden end came as a surprise to me, I thought that they would adapt rather than die. Too bad. Time for a few stiff drinks and ponder the future of Stock.

I think there are too many general stock agencies out there. Unless an agency has a very specific niche it will be very difficult for them to compete with Getty & Corbis.

Further, I would guess that w enough smart people doing the legwork, and w careful spending, photoshelter had a great chance after a few years. Probably will come back in some form (guessing w/out knowing)…

I belong to a bunch of nonG nonC nonexclusive agencies.
I didn’t join this one because it was a workflow cobweb.

<>

Before you cast stones on the PS team and react in anger to the suddenness of this news I encourage you to pause and recognize the real effort and equity they have invested to do something great for all of us. Acknowledge what they attempted to do to help drive badly needed change in an industry desperately in need of change. The existing models are choking the life out of our creative community and there are precious few not only standing up for the community but also working hard to create new technology and new solutions to really evolve it. While it is easy to be critical of their execution and resulting progress in hindsight, from the perspective of someone very much inside this industry, they did a lot. This is a loss to our industry and my sympathies are with those at PS who have lost their jobs and those in the PSC who have lost their faith. The battle to reinvent the business and technology of photography is far from over.

Unfortunately for all of us the venture capital market in general has very little understanding of our industry and even less patience. Many VC’s are a lot like those PSC contributors posting comments three months into the PS Collection’s life complaining that they had not made any sales and were ready to drop out. Little understanding of the dynamics of building a stock photo sales channel combined with ingrained risk-adverse conditioning common to VC’s put a gun to the head of a business only in its infancy. The PSC’s demise was truly premature – and clearly not wholly in the hands of the PS team. That said, now having made the hard choices, there is every reason to believe that PS will succeed – refocused and driving hard – with your support.

Sweet!

I think the internet boom of 2001 is coming back in the business community like a bad case of acid reflux – what investor really thinks a small business entering a mature market (with many VERY large players) can turn a profit so quickly?

I hate to say it, but when you’re dealing with a deadline-based industry such as photography/advertising/editorial, the content isn’t nearly as important as the company’s ability to supply X _____ service efficiently, whether it’s images or widgets or music or whatever. If the picture is great, then even better, but if you can’t get a picture that meets your basic needs by deadline, then nobody is going to slog through a slow kludgy process to get even exceptional images which come in after deadline.

Perhaps a collective would be the way to go since the content generators would be the investors, so they would naturally have more tolerance and an immediate monetary return wouldn’t be their sole motivation.

it seems like the business model could have been, we dont really care if you license images as long as you pay us to host them.

all that said…i just signed up with them for the Personal Archive service, which i like and hope they continue.

They did keep the sales figures close to the vest and obviously there wasn’t enough to hit there marks. It is sad because the concept was cool and many wanted it to succeed.

Watch yourself. Don’t make assumptions. I know more than you think. Sling mud somewhere else.

S

It’s easy and cheap to engage in name-calling, when you have apparently not read the statements of Alan and others, and evidently know even less about what it takes to run a business like PSC.

I’m with @Number 16.

It’s a bummer.

And nobody likes a quitter.

They are good guys in my book.