A Third of a Million
September 3rd, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
fotoLibra passed the third of a million images online mark this morning.
fotoLibra’s Gwyn Headley is speaking at a seminar at the Frankfurt Book Fair titled “From Gutenberg to Google: The Use of Imagery in Publishing.” It will be held on Friday October 16 at 10:00 in the Workshop-Raum.
fotoLibra’s unique feature for book publishers is its Picture Call — publishers can send a list of images they are looking for and fotoLibra’s 17,000 photographers in 160 countries go out and take them, with no obligation on the publisher.
Well, durrr!
August 28th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Big business versus protestors: an American protest group is up in arms because a Powerful Coal Lobby is using images bought from a picture library to depict their supporters.
I guess what they want is for the Powerful Coal Lobby to go out and gather all its supporters together and photograph them to use in its propaganda. Then they can see for real the horns and tails they expect to see worn by PCL supporters.
Instead the PCL bought their pictures from a picture library. Well, durrr!
That’s precisely what picture libraries are for.
These are model released, royalty free images. They can be used for any purpose the purchaser wants.
If the people being photographed have any moral objections to their image being used to promote things they don’t approve of, such as guns, pornography, tobacco etc., they always have an opt-out clause, as all fotoLibra members have for every image they upload. Not many of our people use it, so we assume most of our members are happy to have their Royalty Free images used to promote taxes, the government, banks or any other form of corporate or institutional villainy.
These models clearly don’t mind their images being used to promote the coal industry. So why shouldn’t they be? The protest group could just as easily buy the same image from the same supplier and promote it as a bunch of people implacably opposed to coal mining in any form. The big thing about these RF sales is that they’re non-exclusive — the good guys can use them just as readily as the bad guys.
You can see the images and the story here, and there is also a lesson to be learned for all photographers — there is always a market for photographs of people and groups of people against a white background.
Backgrounds are very important. They should not detract from the subject. Hence the popularity of plain white backgrounds — the Dorling Kindersley effect, as we call it. If you haven’t got a plain white background to hand, try opening up your lens to f1.2.
The other lesson to be learned is when you look at the (otherwise bizarre) pricing structure offered by the agency which sold the pictures, one thing is eminently sensible: the bigger the pixel dimensions of the picture, the more pricing options the buyer has. So it always makes sense to upload the biggest files you can.
Lesson over for today.
Prophecies and Prophets
August 27th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Tags: books, clusterfuck nation, e-books, ebooks, guru, Mike Shatzkin, predictions, prophecies, prophets, publishing
There used to be a stable of magazines in London all with the same name format: Books and Bookmen, Art and Artists, Dance and Dancers. I wonder if they’d have been interested in Prophecies and Prophets as a title.
I was musing on this because this weekend our good friend Mike Shatzkin is coming to stay. He describes himself as a publishing consultant, others call him a publishing guru, I like to think of him as a publishing prophet. He would probably refute this. Few people have ‘Prophet’ on their calling cards (though I did meet a gent from Microsoft who had ‘Director of Publishing Evangelism’ as his job title on his cards). Mike is very keen on e-books, and sees them as the future; I’m keen, but not quite as keen, and see them as part of our future.
The best prophets are inevitably Jewish. Mike proudly claims to be a fourth generation atheist.
Was Mohammed Jewish before he started Islam? (there’s a good example for never starting something you can’t stop). Prophets of Doom. Only Jesus prophesied Good News, and even then only after you were dead. St Paul took a more pragmatic view: ‘where there are prophecies, so they shall vanish away.’
What’s the difference between prophecies and predictions? Prophecy has a more religious ring to it, but the best predictors have to be viewed as prophets. They certainly attract their followers. Jim Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog, always a good read, works hard to present Jim as a prophet, with links to his literary agent, movie agent, lecture agent, ad agent and so on. Perhaps the more dogmatic and absolute the prediction, the more likely it is to be viewed as a prophecy,
On the whole maybe we’d better keep on regarding Mike as a publishing consultant. No serious prophet should stick around to see if his prophecies will come true. And nobody got rich by prophesying good news.
BOMBSHELL
July 24th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I recommend anyone joining fotoLibra to read the Great Expectations blog posting to find out more about the exciting community they are joining.
Ben Shipley posted a comment which I said I’d answer in a new posting. Now David Carton has reminded me that I haven’t answered it, so here goes. First, Ben’s original comment:
It would be nice if the list view showed lightbox adds as well as views (at present the only way to get this info is to try to delete the photo).
Also, after working with other libraries, I am not sure what “views” means – did the photo show up among 1,000 others, or did someone actually bring up the full-size preview? And is that “someone” a valid customer or does it also include fellow members?
The best thing about fotolibra for my money is the way you all try to keep members informed – you seem like a very cool bunch of souls in general – but one can never get too much clarity, especially when it comes to what is selling out there.
Along same lines, I am curious where you see yourselves in the photo universe – what niches you aim for, where you saw this going when you started, where you see it headed today, where you fit into the whole amateur/professional photography experience, not just commercial stock. We get hints from Jacqui, but clarity definitely breeds patience.
Right. The first request is a simple feature enhancement. We already gather this information; the problem is figuring out to feed it to you in a neat, uncluttered, intelligible way. The data feed you currently get has nine columns; adding a tenth is going to make it uglier. We will work this out. It may involve having to drop down through layers of data.
‘Views’ (I answered this) means Thumbnails that have been clicked on to create Previews. The people who click could be either buyers or sellers; if they’re not logged in we don’t know who they are.
We always enjoy compliments. Thank you for that one.
OK, here’s the big one. In our photo universe, we’re not Getty Images, Corbis or Alamy. We’re much smaller, much more flexible, faster and much more personal. Buyers deal directly with the owners of the company, not a nominated ‘account handler’. Some people love this, others actually prefer anonymity and disengagement. When did you last speak to someone from Amazon, Adobe, Google, Microsoft or Apple? But you probably give them your money.
In Britain there are over 600 picture libraries. 440 of us are serious enough about the business to pay an annual subscription of about £500 to BAPLA. In terms of visitors to our web site, we come eighth. So we’re in the top 2%, and we only started 5 years ago. But we still need to do better.
Our major market is book publishing. It’s a market we know and feel comfortable with. We don’t reach ad agencies and design groups as we should. We sell to calendar and greetings card publishers. We don’t do much in the way of celebrities, news or sport.
We started with the intention of providing access to family albums, shoe boxes, the fading photographs in Granny’s attic. But we were swamped by the digital revolution.
HERE’S THE BOMBSHELL. We still want those pictures, so now we’ve decided to do something about it.
Alongside the existing Member, Pro Member and Platinum Member accounts, we are creating a completely new membership category.
It’s going to be called HERITAGE MEMBER. It is completely FREE, and it gives you UNLIMITED storage.
WOW!! I hear you shout. What’s the catch?
The photographs must have been taken before January 1st 1980. They must adhere to our Submission Guidelines.
And that’s it.
Membership will run in tandem with your existing fotoLibra membership. Full details will come with the formal announcement. We hope to have this in place by the beginning of September.
Copyright or no copyright?
July 18th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
It’s rare for a picture library to make the national news, but that’s what the National Portrait Gallery managed today.
In March this year a Wikipedia administrator appropriated three thousand high-resolution images from the NPG website and published them to Wikipedia.
The NPG contacted Wikipedia and asked for the removal of the images. Wikipedia ignored the request. So the NPG issued a lawyer’s letter.
A spokesman for Wikipedia, an amazing and wonderful resource which I use daily, eventually deigned to respond — in one of the most arrogant, high-handed, dismissive, patronising, offensive, overweening blogs I have ever had the pleasure to read.
The National Portrait Gallery, the repository of Britain’s heritage of people paintings, is derided as an antiquated, fusty old dinosaur of an organisation, hopelessly out of touch with spiffy new C21 ways. It wants to CHARGE for images, ferkrissake!
Well, you can read it for yourself here.
The comments are a joy, by turns placatory and inflammatory.
And what it all boils down to is this: should everything be free, or should we pay for people’s work?
To which, I guess, everyone at heart would share the same response: everything should be free for me, but I want to be paid for my work.
The Wikipedia / NPG confrontation is a no-brainer; it’s straightforward theft, it’s illegal, and Wikipedia should cease and desist instantly. No argument. Being British, the NPG is unlikely to pursue for damages.
But what I cannot understand is how Wikipedia got its hands on 3,000 hi-res images from the NPG (which, frankly, charges an awful lot of money for the use of its images, so it is no saint either) in the first place? Nor can I understand why it needs them — the NPG has indicated that it is happy to allow Wikipedia to display small lo-res copies of the images, which is all you need on a web site. Why on earth would Wikipedia want to hold on to this stolen property?
And does the NPG have no security? If anyone downloads a hi-res image from fotoLibra, they pay for it. We know all about it. How could the NPG have let three THOUSAND expensive hi-res images slip through their fingers? Or were they hacked?
I think we should be told.
Primary School Books
July 10th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I visited a primary school today to look through their text books to see which publishers needed to use fotoLibra.
They showed me fourteen text books published by Heinemann, Ginn, Longman, Oliver & Boyd, BBC Active, Pearson and Marshall Cavendish.
The books were largely published between 1991 and 1996, long before any of the children at the school were born. Only one of the books was published this century, in 2001.
With the exception of Marshall Cavendish, all the imprints I saw are now part of one company.
Luckily, we supply images to them.
I noticed two of the books mentioned Tenochtitlan in Mexico City. We recently sent out a picture call for images of Tenochtitlan, without any luck. We still want them!
White Labelling
July 9th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
One of the smartest guys I know asked me what ‘white labelling’ was yesterday.
It’s a salutary lesson; remember how easy and how dangerous it is to slip into jargon, and how stock phrases (blue sky thinking, ongoing situation, granularity, reading from the same hymn sheet) can be used to talk glibly yet avoid thinking too deeply about any problem we face.
But ‘white label’ is not so much jargon as a straightforward description. I haven’t consulted Wikipedia, but I’ll attempt my own definition here.
If you go to buy a refrigerator, it may or may not have a brand name stuck on the door: Frigidaire, Zanussi, Smeg, Hotpoint, AEG, Indesit, Bosch, Lec, whatever. But if you compare a couple of models you might be struck by the fact that apart from the name on the door, inside they are identical machines.
That’s because they are. They’re probably built in the same factory, on the same production line, probably in China or somewhere, and then sold to the brand owners who stick their names on the doors, add a chrome strip and flog them as theirs.
As a boy I used to be fascinated by American cars of the 1950s (still am) and it didn’t take me too long to realise that the 1956 Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac were all essentially the same car, and only differed in trim and engine options. They were all General Motors products, in the days when what was good for GM was good for America. Effectively they were white labelled — same thing, different name.
If you build your own fridge or car or photo library there’s no reason why you can’t let other people use it and give it their own name. This thought has occurred to me several times while we were constructing (at vast expense) fotoLibra’s digital asset management engine. At the moment it’s only used by fotoLibra.
It’s rock solid, reliable, fast, and robust. It’s infinitely expandable, comes with a full set of tools and virtually all the problems our Support team ever have to answer turn out to be at the user’s end rather than at ours.
Why keep it to ourselves? Why not let others store their film in it or drive it and call it their own, to labour on with my fridge / car analogy? The great majority of fotoLibra users will get all they need from the fotoLibra service, but there will be a few professional photographers who will need a more personalised, individualised bespoke product.
Maybe we should think about providing it.
fotoLibra Pro Blog Index
July 8th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
January – June 2009
Here’s an index to the fotoLibra Pro Blog for the first 6 months of 2009. In the future this will be updated in something closer to real time.
It took a surprising amount of time to compile, so if there are any WordPress experts out there who know how to automate this process, we’d love to hear from you.
HINTS & TIPS
- Three hundred pixels per inch
- Shots of Redemption
- How To Take Aerial Photographs When You Haven’t Got An Aeroplane
- Compression
- Great Expectations
- RSVP
ABOUT FOTOLIBRA
- Picture Calls
- fotoLibra DND & Checker 2.1 Released
- Drag ‘n’ Drop Upload Checker
- The New Picture Call Tab
- SPQR
- Search Engines and fotoLibra
- Yahoo Blocks Our Emails
- It’s got to be today
- 300,000 up!
ADOBE
CUSTOMERS
E-BOOKS
IT
MISCELLANY
- Proto-foto-Libra
- Cancelled Air Show
- Giving It Away For Free
- A heritage in photography
- Farewell Kodachrome
- The perils of publishing
- Happy New Year
NETWORKING
NEWS
PICTURE CALLS
SECURITY
TRADE FAIRS
Big Jobs
June 26th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
No, this is nothing to do with Steve.
fotoLibra was given a tender document from a large organisation. We read it carefully, and with respect, because the business has a fine reputation.
They wanted
a) a digital asset management system
b) a secure web hosting service
c) digitisation of 6 million images in varying formats from glass plates to transparencies
d) complete metadata applied to each image
In return for all this they offered “a licence for a limited period of time to exploit the photographs commercially.”
No cash. No other form of payment at all.
And by the way the 2,000 existing users of the archive must continue to be able to access and download the content for free, including all the newly digitised and keyworded assets. They’re not included in the commercial licence.
I believe they may have to rethink this proposal. The cost of digitising and applying metadata to 6 million images would be north of £20 million.
This is a huge job, and a massive investment. Commercial exploitation would be unlikely to recoup a twentieth of this amount. The length of the licence would have to be in centuries in order to claw back the original investment.
Not for us — but thanks for thinking of us!
Lovely Clients
June 25th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Here at fotoLibra we love our clients. They buy our member’s images, they pay us, they keep us in business.
Love is an inadequate word to be nestled among the glories of the English language. The Ancient Greeks had at least four words to describe different types of love*, whereas we just have to muddle through with plain old Love.
But our love for our clients is, shall we say, storgéan*. A new client bought a total of two pictures off us and threw a tantrum when he couldn’t have them at the same price per image he was getting from MammonPix, with whom he had a £50,000 p.a. contract.
Another sent us a picture order with the following ominous rider:
Upon payment of this fee, the design copyright and all other rights throughout the world in this material will be vested in us.
Umm … I’m no lawyer, but that reads curiously like a rights grab to us. We have demanded clarification.
The copyright in all fotoLibra images is asserted by our photographers. It’s not our business to sell their inheritance for a mess of pottage.
* OK then, I’m glad you asked:
αγάπη : AGAPÉ : Love as in ‘I love you.’ This is the ‘charity’ of ‘faith, hope and charity’ in I Corinthians XIII.
ερως : EROS : Love as in ‘I fancy you something rotten and I’m going to do terrible things to you.’
στοργή : STORGE : Love as in ‘My bloody teenage son came home pissed again last night.’
φιλία : PHILIA : Love as in ‘You’re my best mate, you are.’ PHILAdelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.
Breaking news: we demanded clarification, and they have charitably removed the clause from the picture order. I wonder if we’ll ever hear from them again? I need faith.
And hope.