New Stock Photography Site Beta - Some Invites For POTN Members

[lawrencedudley]

Hi Guys,

This isn't meant as any kind of spam message - I think it's something that will interest you guys and benefit you all in making money out of your images :)

We've just (literally in the last half an hour) launched a limited beta of Pixelfetch.com which is a new stock photography site designed to shake up the stock photography industry.

We felt that traditional microstock sites have stagnated a bit recently - they don't keep up with trends across the internet at all and they're pretty clunky and old-fashioned and their user interfaces are horrible.

Pixelfetch is built on some pretty awesome technology and while it's very much in beta (you can't buy any images on the site for another few weeks yet), we've got a ridiculously long roadmap of features that will push stock sales up (earning you more money).

At the moment we're just looking to have a database of photographs online that we can test with and launch new features from - we're currently in soft launch mode and will be having a hard launch in a few weeks time. As beta users you'll benefit from being the only people with photos on the site when we hard launch into public mode, which should gain you extra exposure.

Your help testing the system and uploading photos is much appreciated, and we'll think of a suitable thank you to all of you who do sign up in the next few weeks as a sign of our gratitude.

Stay tuned, this is going to be big

To register please use the following link:

http://www.pixelfetch.com/users/register?invite=photographyonthenet

There's 50 invites allocated to the above link so snap them up while you can or you'll miss out.

For those of you who sign up it should be a pretty exciting few weeks with new features being added every day or two and you'll get to play a large part in helping to shape what will, with any luck, become a one-stop shop for stock photographs.

Kind Regards and thanks for your time,

Lawrence Dudley
Director - Pixelfetch

Any questions about Pixelfetch should be directed at support@pixelfetch.com - we look forward to answering any questions or suggestions, feedback or anything else you might have for us.

[KenjiS]

Joined :3 Already uploading a few of my images....

[lawrencedudley]

Awesome, cheers Kenji :-) It might not seem like much is going on with the site right now but we'll keep you updated and let you know when major updates occur.

[ajayclicks]

Joined :3 Already uploading a few of my images....

Congrats.... 75 cents per image download, free pics to bloggers

[Spencerj]

have posted a few images but after i uploaded the second and third ones it still showed the first image. it didnt give me the option of adding keywords to the second or third images??? the dominent colour thing looks a bit off as well?

[hotrod100]

I've posted five images and I wasn't able to add keywords either....?

[lawrencedudley]

Hiya,

If those of you having problems could send a screenshot of where the error occurred and a brief description of the problem to support@pixelfetch.com that would be awesome.

If you could also include the browser that you're using (Internet Explorer 6/7, Safari, Firefox etc) that would help us loads too.

Apologies for the teething problems but it is a beta and problems are bound to crop up here and there.

Congrats.... 75 cents per image download, free pics to bloggers

Yep, it's not going to buy you a Ferrari but the days of being able to sell, in bulk, images for hundreds of $$$ is over. Go check the commission on other stock sites - it's usually substantially lower. It's been proven you can make a decent passive income out of microstock as long as your images are good enough.

As for Bloggers, I've included the following by way of explanation - it's for a select market (there is an approval process involved) which wouldn't spend money on stock anyway.

the problem with blogs is that they don't usually make any money and hence no matter how cheap stock photographs are, the writers can't really justify spending money on images to illustrate their content.

because the readers of blogs will always be potential customers of ours we have decided to license our entire catalogue to the blogging community. for free.

this solution is good for our contributors because it gets free publicity for their images across thousands of blogs across the internet and of course it's great for bloggers everywhere because they can take advantage of stock images to spruce up their content that they couldn't previously afford.

The images that are used on the blogging side are still watermarked and are all linked to your accounts, along with a notice that they are for sale - anyone clicks on them and you have a potential sale.

Let us know if you have any other questions :-)

[canonnoob]

it is not letting me register....

EDIT: nevermind.

[lawrencedudley]

Glad you figured it out :-) Keep us updated and let us know how you get on. The feedback tab at the left is a great way of posting bugs/feature requests and everything else you can think of!

[canonnoob]

quick question, say if a blog uses our photos... will we be told like we would if we sold..?

[lawrencedudley]

Very good question...

There will be a simple API which lets us limit use of free images to non-commercial blogs, and there will be full reporting information available to you as well.

The account page currently has one tab - selling, there's actually a few more in there but they're currently hidden, and one of them has all the information about blogs in it.

We can actually provide a hefty chunk of information about the blog uses - even going as far as view statistics etc.

We may put in place a limit of, for instance, 500 views for a given image on a given blog as well, this might avoid the approval process and ensure that anyone with a significant amount of traffic still purchases your images.

We want this feature to be fair to photographers and we're not trying to rip you off with it, I can see how "free" and "my photos" is quite a scary thought but it's got a lot going for it because it vastly increases the exposure of your photographs to audiences which are going to want to buy them.

Just throwing ideas around here really, so feel free to give me your thoughts!

[phigment]

So, I'm new to the concept of stock. When you say one cost... does that mean some large corporation can download my pic and use it on a mass marketing campaign for $1.50? Even if they post it on billboards and in magazines?

Or do they have to 'download' it for each real print they are going to make?

[clickclickclick]

I joined

[Scuff]

I'll start uploading a batch of accepted and best sellers from the main 'other' agencies to see what interest there is.

[lawrencedudley]

We're just working out the licenses that photographs will be available under - we'll try our best to make it as fair to photographers as possible.

The one.price of $1.50 makes sense when targeting small businesses, but I guess the terms of it need to be restrictive in some way because I totally agree that $1.50 on a big marketing campaign is ripping the photographer off.

What do you guys think the prices for big runs and/or marketing campaigns should be? We need to be consistent in the pricing of this sort of stuff but it needs to be something both photographers and end clients will be happy with.

We're thinking some kind of print run/cost calculation kind of thing makes most sense.

[KenjiS]

We're just working out the licenses that photographs will be available under - we'll try our best to make it as fair to photographers as possible.

The one.price of $1.50 makes sense when targeting small businesses, but I guess the terms of it need to be restrictive in some way because I totally agree that $1.50 on a big marketing campaign is ripping the photographer off.

What do you guys think the prices for big runs and/or marketing campaigns should be? We need to be consistent in the pricing of this sort of stuff but it needs to be something both photographers and end clients will be happy with.

We're thinking some kind of print run/cost calculation kind of thing makes most sense.

Maybe...increments of $1.50?

I'm not sure how we judge it...$1.50 per 500 uses? Whats a standard measure for this sort of thing?

[lawrencedudley]

We've had a think about it and the problem is that it's hard to track usage or even foresee it.

We don't currently have a lawyer on board (we will ensure this is the case once we can afford one) so we have taken a leaf out of Shutterstock's book and gone with a basic license and an extended license.

The basic license (one.price) is limited to runs of 10,000 which I think is a good amount to restrict use of this license to small/medium businesses. It's important that we can cater to this audience of buyers at a low, simple, easy to understand price because a lot of them aren't aware of the benefits of using stock, or are confused and scared away by complex pricing structures.

The extended license (pixel+) essentially retains the limitations of the basic license but places no limits on the amount of reproductions.


The extended license is going to be priced somewhere around $75/£50/€50, which is competitive and, we feel, fair to photographers and publishers alike.

What are your thoughts on this? I will post a link to the terms shortly so you can have a look through them.

[KenjiS]

We've had a think about it and the problem is that it's hard to track usage or even foresee it.

We don't currently have a lawyer on board (we will ensure this is the case once we can afford one) so we have taken a leaf out of Shutterstock's book and gone with a basic license and an extended license.

The basic license (one.price) is limited to runs of 10,000 which I think is a good amount to restrict use of this license to small/medium businesses. It's important that we can cater to this audience of buyers at a low, simple, easy to understand price because a lot of them aren't aware of the benefits of using stock, or are confused and scared away by complex pricing structures.

The extended license (pixel+) essentially retains the limitations of the basic license but places no limits on the amount of reproductions.


The extended license is going to be priced somewhere around $75/£50/€50, which is competitive and, we feel, fair to photographers and publishers alike.

What are your thoughts on this? I will post a link to the terms shortly so you can have a look through them.


Sounds good to me!

[lawrencedudley]

License details can be found here, they're in a nice tabulated view so it should be easy to understand, we'll get the actual lawyer-proof licenses done soon:

http://pixelfetch.com/licenses

[lawrencedudley]

There's some interesting discussions on features going on on getsatisfaction for anyone interested - you can find them here: http://getsatisfaction.com/pixelfetch

The above is where we pull the vast majority of our feedback from (the rest being forums like this one) and it's an amazing tool to get your voice heard.

[Eagle]

Registered and uploading now.

[Karl Johnston]

It kind of turns me off how the homepage isn't written with the much adherence to basic grammar rules..and this sounds kind of sketchy:
because the readers of blogs will always be potential customers of ours we have decided to license our entire catalogue to the blogging community. for free.
In other words, you automatically make that choice for everyone who's registered with your site? I think you need more than a couple of weeks to go through the legal part, too. It also turns me off that you state on the site that you can't afford to hire one...

[skycop60]

If you know the company about to use your photo, then a direct contact name for negotiating a reasonable part of the budget for the campaign, offline of course, would help.
The site might be able to provide a simple contract form for the novice photographer and maybe a paper on how and what to negotiate for. Simple stuff but at least a help to the photographer and the company wanting the photo. Just my thoughts. Thanks.

[jacuff]

We don't currently have a lawyer on board (we will ensure this is the case once we can afford one)

I signed up for the site, but I'm not convinced I want to upload any photos yet. Now that you've started accepting work from others, you really can't afford to not have a lawyer.

The one price licensing was a concern. You've started to address it, but I'm probably going to wait until you get a lawyer to go over your licensing issues and other things regarding your venture.

[40d]

Hi Lawrence,

Your site is actually rather poor I'm afraid - good job it's in beta so you've got time to make some improvements. At present you have none of the functionality or usability of sites such as iStock.com. Using what appears to be a homegrown impersonation of Cooliris is a nice enough idea but only if it's implemented properly. On your site it's slow and clunky - I made a search that had 200 results but had to sit and wait for a "loading pixel x of x" to completely load all 200 images before anything could be seen. The wait was painfully slow and you will lose most visitors right there.

The design doesn't look professional - you should work on this (or hire a professional designer) if you are expecting people to trust you and use your services. Also you really need a logo.

Now you're laying down some pretty wild claims to the good folks here so I'd like to ask you a couple of questions if I may...

Firstly what is your marketing plan?

Secondly, how do you intend to protect contributors images without legal representation?

[lawrencedudley]

A lot of our marketing is going to come through the use of images on blogs - the availability of free blog images is going to give the site a chunk of publicity, and it will quickly become a staple of many bloggers tools.

You might not quite get it but the result will be that pixelfetch will be advertised all over the internet, with links to purchase the images hosted there, which will increase awareness of the stock photography market greatly.

I hear you talking about features - maybe Beta was the wrong word to use - most people now think of "Beta" as something that's pretty much a finished product. Ours is an actual Beta, maybe we should refer to it as an Alpha instead - it's nowhere near feature complete yet, but we'd like to have community participation in the development of the site because that's the way we like working.

We're a small start-up, and yes, we don't have a lawyer yet, at least not one dedicated to pixelfetch anyway - we will ensure that copyright isn't abused and when we need to, we will hire a copyright lawyer.

At the moment we're not even selling anything yet, so we don't see a need for one quite yet.

Nothing is going to be sold on the site until the licenses are hammered out, we'd just like to have a nice catalogue to work with and test against, and eventually launch with, and we do send out notifications about beta updates to everyone.

When the time comes (a few weeks yet) we will send out the proper licenses to everyone, so they can go through them properly, and you're more than welcome to delete your account and your photographs from pixelfetch at this point if you're not 100% happy with them - we're not going to hold your photographs to ransom ^_^

We've done some optimisations on the pixelflow view today which should speed things up by 300%-400% depending on connection latency - there will be more traditional views available soon and you also have to bear in mind that we're currently running off a small server as we haven't deployed out to Amazon Web Services for our storage and processing yet, so stuff might be a little slow on occasion.

With regards to the design, it's subjective, we like it and have gained a lot of good feedback about it, although changes will appear over time. I had a look at your design work 40d - just because *I* don't like it doesn't mean it's no good.

We're trying to keep our UI as minimal as possible and a lot of thought has and still is going into workflow - something that's really annoyed me as someone who has stock catalogues on a lot of other sites is that there never seems to be a clear workflow to any of them, everything tends to be all over the shop and bolted on in quite nasty ways, so that's something we're trying to do right.

Just try and remember that our aim is to build a tool that the community thinks is awesome - if enough people agree that we're doing something wrong we'll change it, and because we're a relatively small start-up our turnaround times are in the order of days as opposed to months.

Thanks everyone for the feedback, it's great to hear your views on everything, and I hope the above has answered some questions for you all.

[40d]

So you're relying on organic marketing. It CAN work but remember that you need pickup in the first place and that it takes a long time. You certainly aren't going to go viral with this.

Now don't get me wrong - I hope that you succeed - I hope that everyone succeeds really... I just don't think your site is up to it yet. A slow difficult to use site (minimal design isn't the same as no design) certainly isn't going to lend itself to the organic growth that you are hoping for.

[lawrencedudley]

Yeah, don't worry - we won't launch until everything feels right. I think a viral element will be present but obviously we need more than that to sustain it - virals are a great of way of publicising something but there has to be continuous momentum to get sales in the long run.

We don't think our site is up to it *yet* either, which is why we have launched a semi-public beta to get feedback and make changes. It'll be very slick when it's finished and the guys coding the site are extremely talented.

Keep following the project and you'll see some really cool stuff happening over the next few weeks and beyond :-)

[Paul Li]

Cool, uploading a few images...

Edit:
You should let us change the image titles and tags, and the image searcher is very slow.

[Eagle]

How many shots do you want us to upload into the beta?

Are these shots going to remain on site once it goes live?

Are these shots reviewed by staff? And will shots be reviewed once live?

[bzollinger]

Just registered, and uploaded a few photos. Keep us updated with progress and new features.

One thing I noticed is the "feedback button" on the left side of the screen using Vista/IE 7" gets in the way to the point where you can't read the content on the site where the button is. Also the formatting of registration form was all messed up. Good luck!

[Jacobredphoto]

Just registered, uploaded one decent photo. I'd like to wait until everything is up and running before uploading anymore.

[lawrencedudley]

Hi guys,

Apologies for not getting back sooner - I've had quite a lot on and been super busy.

Let me answer the points mentioned above:

Cool, uploading a few images...

Edit:
You should let us change the image titles and tags, and the image searcher is very slow.

Have a look at http://www.getsatisfaction.com/pixelfetch for a full list of features and bugs/problems - both points have already been noted and are next on our todo list of things that need to be sorted. Thank you for taking the time to feedback on these though!

How many shots do you want us to upload into the beta?

As many as you want, the more "real" data we can test our search algorithms against the better the outcome really... Plus you might manage to break it or notice slow performance if you upload lots of images which will help us avoid having these problems once we're live.

Stress test away, the more stuff breaks now, the less stuff can go wrong at any point in the future.

Are these shots going to remain on site once it goes live?

Yes, they will - however we are going to implement a "delete my account" feature and have a sort of amnesty period of a week or so between finalising licenses and pricing and actually opening up for sales because at the moment the terms you'd be selling under are still being decided upon and we don't want people to be pulled into anything they haven't specifically opted into.

Are these shots reviewed by staff? And will shots be reviewed once live?

We've taken the line of editing merely on technical quality, not content for now. We don't really mind if we think your image will sell or not as we don't really believe that we should be deciding this - there's a market for most images if you find the right buyers. The only thing that we'll reject at present are photos that are low quality, blurry (in the "out of focus" sense as opposed to the creative sense).

Something that's always annoyed us about other stock sites stringent image acceptance standards is that they often end up stifling creativity. We don't decide what will sell - the market does that for us.

[Paul Li]

Any model release forms? And how do we submit them?

[lawrencedudley]

Once again, on it's way - check the getsatisfaction site for the full info on how we are handling them :-)

[the_weird_one]

Joined and uploading an image as I type this

[JOE's]

Just registered and will upload pix later, thanks

[JOE's]

im just curious by any chance you forget your password, is there a password help on this???

[Go4EVA!]

OK, I uploaded 5 "test images." They now appear in the main catalog, and they are "searchable" by keyword, but when I log-in to my personal account, it says that I have not uploaded any photos, and there are no thumbnails, or anything showing. Is that the way it is supposed to work? Are my photos still somehow tagged as belonging to me?

Also, is there a way to change the nickname on my user account? I used my real name when I registered, which I guess is OK, but I'd prefer to use a nickname for consistency with my other on-line groups (like here on POTN).

[cypressimage]

I joined. I'll start downloading this weekend. Thanks, great idea.

[Naturephotoz]

First, I am not joining but I have a comment to protect those who are...

Do you limit the bloggers to a certain size image that they can download? If so what is it?

If you allow the bloggers to download full resolution images from your stock site what is stopping someone from just copy-paste and they can forget about buying it because they already have it??

Good luck to you and your endeavor...

[jgoodstein]

apparently the invite is all gone:-( page gave invalid code error

[bzollinger]

Yah, can you tell us what is going on with the site and our pictures? The site has been offline for months.

[jacuff]

OP may not even be checking this site anymore. Probably best to email him directly.
From: http://www.lawrencedudley.co.uk/contact/
Email: iam@lawrencedudley.co.uk

[bzollinger]

I did send him an email via this site. So given that this site has his correct address then he got it. Thanks for all the info!

[I_ask2learn_I_learn2ask]

link doesn't even work. says site does not exist.