fotoLibra Pro Blog

     

   300,000 up!
   April 17th, 2009 
  


   
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: 300000 images, fotoLibra, marketing photographs, photography, picture library, picture sales, selling pictures, stock agency
It IS today!
Today fotoLibra passed the landmark of 300,000 high quality, hi-res images on line. While we’re not yet quite up there with the Gettys and Corbises of this world, it’s still a goodly number and enough to give picture buyers a very wide and eclectic selection indeed.
And all our images have come from our 17,000+ wonderful members, photographers, collectors and artists. But mainly photographers. A lot of the monster stock agencies merely represent other collections, so their picture count jumps by 50,000 each time they sign up a new agency. Our images are uploaded individually, directly to our servers. They’re each selected with care and pride.
I snapped the home page when I spotted the counter had rolled over the magic mark:


300,000+ images online!
So we’re all pleased, except the office has been laid low by a lurgy and I’m the only man standing. So I get the magnum of Krug. Shame.
I remember when the idea of fotoLibra was just a gleam in my rheumy eye, I sought advice from the wonderful Anne-Marie Ehrlich, doyenne of picture researchers and the heart of The Picture Desk. While not exactly dismissive of my beautiful new baby, she said it was hard for a picture library to be taken seriously until it had accumulated about 25,000 images.
Done that. Been there. Beaten it by 275,000.
Now to be taken seriously!

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   It’s got to be today
   April 17th, 2009 
  


   
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: fotoLibra, marketing photographs, picture library, sales, selling pictures, stock agency, stock photography, success
As I write this there are 299,898 high quality, hi-res images for sale on fotoLibra.
Today we will break the 300,000 barrier. I hope.
Of course like 300 ppi, it doesn’t actually mean a lot. Except for a lot of hard work from our wonderful photographers and, I must admit, us.
We’d be celebrating if it wasn’t for the fact that both Yvonne and Damien are off sick. So I guess I’ll have to have the champagne all to myself, as Jacqui and Llinos aren’t here.
Unlike the big portal sites, who have thousands of identical images accumulated from other image libraries and shot as blandly as possible for stock, we have individual images by individual photographers — 17,000 of them. Hand crafted rather than mass produced.
Hey — it’s a landmark. Well done everybody.

8 
Comments    

   Danish Photographer Off The Job
   April 16th, 2009 
  


   
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: Denmark, fotoLibra, Photoshop, Picture of the Year competition, pressefotografforbundet.dk
The snappily named website pressefotografforbundet.dk has an intriguing story (fortunately for me, in English) about an entrant in the annual Danish Picture Of The Year competition.
The judges asked to see photographer Klavs Bo Christensen’s RAW files. On comparing them with his entries, they decided his Photoshopping was somewhat on the Extreme side, and they threw him out of the competition.
The competition rules state “Photos submitted to Picture of The Year must be a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure. You may post-process the images electronically in accordance with good practice. That is cropping, burning, dodging, converting to black and white as well as normal exposure and color correction, which preserves the image’s original expression. The Judges and exhibition committee reserve the right to see the original raw image files, raw tape, negatives and/or slides. In cases of doubt, the photographer can be pulled out of the competition.”
You can read the whole story, and see Christensen’s RAW and processed images, here.
Frankly I think he went way over the top, and they were right to ban him. To my eye, his RAW images are preferable to the garish artificiality of the Photoshopped images.
I’d be interested to hear what you think.

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   Yahoo Blocks Our Emails
   April 16th, 2009 
  


   
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: BTInternet, Hotmail, Yahoo
We have been deluged by junk mail over the past few days, even more than usual, and as Yvonne has a migraine I’m checking her emails as well.
I thought I got bombarded with junk — but she gets twice as much. She was sent over a thousand between midnight and nine am.
Anyway, this morning Jacqui Norman sent out four Picture Calls to our members (who sign up voluntarily — there is little or no coercion) and loads of them came bouncing back, all with email addresses ending in yahoo.com — Delivery temporarily suspended: host mx2.bt.mail.yahoo.com[195.60.116.133] refused to talk to me: 424 4.6.0 [TS02] and other such impenetrable computer speak.
If I’d signed up for a service like fotoLibra and didn’t hear anything more from them, I’d be inclined to think the company didn’t care. It wouldn’t occur to me that my service provider was blocking messages from them. It’s damaging to us, but I’m at a loss as to know how to deal with it.
The prime offenders are Yahoo, Hotmail and BTInternet. We even have a note in our Welcome email to new members that if they use one of those service providers for their email, the should add mailman@fotoLibra.com to their address book. Even that doesn’t always work, but it helps a little bit.
We’ve tried contacting the companies direct, however we have but a limited life span on this earth and I don’t intend to spend it listening to ‘Fur Elise’ played on a Stylophone. These are companies that are not comfortable talking to customers or other outsiders.
Maybe they have Google Alerts when their names get mentioned frequently. So, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, Yahoo, Hotmail, BTInternet, how do we become an acceptable entity in your eyes?

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   Why Pay More?
   April 15th, 2009 
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   
Old business model for start-ups:
1. Think of name

2. Employ expensive graphic designer and picture library to supply corporate theme and visual content

3. Trade happily ever after
New business model for start-ups:
1. Make up name not already registered as a dot com

2. Run competition to choose images and graphics

3. Award winner of competition the honor of seeing his work used by new megacorp

4. Save $000s
Clever it certainly is. But sustainable? Surely designers and photographers will come to their senses? Or is this solely aimed at the sub-graduate sector?
Whatever; if this really catches on there won’t be any jobs for them to graduate to. Designers and photographers need the protection of agencies such as fotoLibra to save them from themselves.

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   The perils of publishing
   April 9th, 2009 
  


   
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, fundamentalists, Getty Images, picture libraries, terrorism. al-Qaeda, terrorists
In every society there is a need for openness and a need for secrecy.
Fundamentalists have planned and are planning terrorist attacks on our way of life. They plot and connive with as much secrecy as they can muster.
The prime function of government should be to protect its people, and the executive arm of that prime function is generally the police force.
British bobbies haven’t been covering themselves with glory recently. Running over a 16 year old schoolgirl at 94mph, batonning down a non-protesting passer-by (from the back) who died 5 minutes later, and yesterday Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, our top counter-terrorism officer, arrives at 10 Downing Street with The Secret Plan to catch these vile fundies tucked underneath his arm.
Not in his briefcase, note, but tucked underneath his arm. In full view of the world’s press. With their expensive cameras with hi-res lenses.
Getty Images, a picture library a little larger than fotoLibra, had a photographer or two on site. The images were on the wire and syndicated around the world in minutes. Then someone noticed you could actually read The Secret Plan to trap the fundies. It was there in plain view, tucked underneath  Assistant Commissioner Quick’s arm, a clean sheet of A4 headed “Security Service-led investigation into suspected AQ (al-Qaeda) driven attack planning within the UK”.
Oops. 
The Government issued a D-Notice, which bans British media from publishing sensitive material. It has no validity in Calais, Cincinatti or Cairo. Getty Images withdrew the images from their site. 
But it had already been syndicated around the world, and they had no power to order its removal from other publishers. I bet servers in Pakistan were overloaded last night. The police had no option but to carry out the plan immediately, and eleven Pakistanis and one Brit (perhaps of Pakistani origin — we don’t know) were arrested yesterday.

This morning Quick quite rightly resigned. It was a monumental blunder.

I think with true British phlegm the situation can best be summed up in England’s noblest native verse form, the clerihew:
Bob Quick

Is a bit of a dick

For revealing his terrorist investigation

To photographers with worldwide syndication.

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Comments    

   The sites I’ve seen
   April 9th, 2009 
  


   
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: blog, FaceBook, fotoLibra, LinkedIn, networking, Twitter
Networking and staying in touch is important, and blogs and group sites like Facebook and LinkedIn provide a chance for the shyest and most retiring among us to stand up and have our say.
I’m not the only person to walk into a roomful of strangers and be struck dumb with terror. I know it makes no sense, but it’s hard wired into me. So I force myself to blog, and Twitter, and post.
Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes I feel I’m talking to a roomful of strangers. Hostile ones, at that. Or even worse, an empty room.
You can’t go everywhere, unless others circulate what you say (please!) So these are the rooms I’m often going into, and where you can always find me.
THE FOTOLIBRA BLOG: http://blog.fotoLibra.com

This is where I and other fotoLibra folk can chew the fat about picture libraries, images rights, sales, new formats for rights sales such as e-books, Picture Calls, cameras, markets, trends, publishing, photographs — anything to do with the business of visual content provision, which incidentally is the long name of fotoLibra’s holding company, VisConPro.
THE FOTOLIBRARIAN BLOG: http://fotolibrarian.fotolibra.com

More domestic and personal. Dogs, cats, tortoises, rugby, cricket, F1, food, follies, fonts, guitars, walks, cars, cigars, scotches, watches, beer, wine, women, song — the little things that keep me interested and alive. In case anyone didn’t know that ATB before my signature in my emails stood for All The Best, I’m thinking of changing it to IDH — In Deteriorating Health.
LINKEDIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gwynheadley

Professional business networking site. If you know me through work or want to do business with fotoLibra, this is my site of choice. I haven’t used it that often, but recently I’ve been attracted by the Ebooks, Digital Books and Digital Content Publishing Network group. When I have time to explore it, I’ll find or found a Picture Library group.
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com

Yeah, I know. Young women and girls. But they’re my nieces, he protested! This is how I keep in touch with a surprising number of my family and old friends. Grand-nieces are included too, as well as nephews. Not generally a place where I post stuff of interest to fotoLibra. My Facebook name is, surprisingly, Gwyn Headley.
TWITTER: http://twitter.com/home

It gets worse. Yes, I twitter. There, I’ve said it. In 140 characters or less. It’s a way of pointing people to blogs. I hope. I’d love to know how it raised $35 million without a business plan. I twitter on pro and personal subjects, often directing fellow twitterers to a particularly apposite blog. My Twitter name is fotoLibrarian.
Five of these networking tools may be plenty for most, but there is room for a sixth, and it’s going to be on fotoLibra. You can read about it here. It’s a while away yet, but it’s going to be a great tool for photographers and picture researchers alike.
Finally, before we had all this internetworking wizardry, people simply met each other in crowded smokey rooms. And Publisher’s Lunch quoted me as saying “Networking is the opportunity to be ignored by people who’ve known each other all their lives.”

     
   Shots of Redemption
   April 3rd, 2009 
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: advice, fotoLibra, help, hints, how to take photographs that sell, photography, picture library, Submission Guidelines, support, tips, useful
We’ve just released Version 4.5 of the fotoLibra Submission Guidelines, which detail precisely the requirements we need from images uploaded to fotoLibra.

You can download the regular lo-res version from here, but if you would prefer the hi-res version and don’t object to a 2.4 MB file, download the fotoLibra Submission Guidelines HQ version here.

Whichever you choose, you’ll probably be fast asleep before you reach page 15, so as it’s quite useful to bear these thoughts in mind when you next pick up a camera I’ve reproduced that page here.
GWYN HEADLEY’S SHOTS OF REDEMPTION

•• The following tips from fotoLibra’s founder apply to the majority of photographic situations, but were written mainly with outdoor photography in mind. He makes no claim to be a photographer himself, but he does know what sells.

•• Portrait (vertical) images outsell landscape images by about 60:40.

•• Photograph people’s fronts, not their backs.

•• Most books and magazines are portrait in orientation, and buyers and designers often like to see large blank areas (sky, sea, fields) where headlines and copy can be dropped in.

•• Jigsaws demand the opposite; lots of colour, lots of detail, all in sharp focus.

•• If you see a wonderful photo opportunity, take it in both landscape and portrait formats.

•• Interesting skies are important.

•• If you can get back to the location, take it in spring, summer, autumn and winter, snow and sun, dawn and dusk, mist and fog, rain and shine, storm and stress.

•• Use a tripod wherever possible.

•• When using digital, always shoot in RAW and convert to JPEG later.

•• Make sure your horizons are level and your sea doesn’t slope.

•• For those who are trained in perspective control or are experienced with rising front cameras, converging verticals can be corrected in a photo manipulation program such as Adobe Photoshop or Irfanview.

•• If you have uploaded a large collection (over 200 images) covering a particular subject, please tell fotoLibra about it.

•• Make use of reflections in water, even in wet roads and pavements.

•• Look carefully around and beyond the subject of your photograph, especially at the edges of the frame, and check what’s intruding into your shot.

•• Take photographs in the early morning and late evening, not at noon.

•• When the light is flat with few shadows, photograph details which need low contrast, such as inscriptions, carvings, etc.

•• Please do not upload photographs of sunsets. They do not sell. Scenes shot during sunsets are fine, but not when the sunset is the subject of the image.

•• Exceptions prove the rule.

•• Every picture must tell a story.

•• Take your time.

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   The New Picture Call Tab
   April 2nd, 2009 
  


   
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: fotoLibra, images, marketing photographs, Picture Call, selling photographs
We’ve just added a new tab to the fotoLibra members’ Control Centre which helps photographers organise and assess their responses to Jacqui Norman’s Picture Calls. This is what it does:
• supplies the complete original Picture Call brief

• shows a sample line of images submitted to the Picture Call

• shows which images the member has submitted to the Picture Call

• allows members to add images directly to the Picture Call from their Portfolios

• allows members to remove images or swap them from one Picture Call to another

• shows all the images offered for each Picture Call so members can see what’s needed and what’s not
We think it’s a major improvement on the old system, and offers far more transparency which we were unable to provide until we created this interface. And from what we’ve heard so far, all our members agree with us. After the screen shots come a few sample comments. I know I’ve been accused (by Jacqui) of running a Dear Leader-style ‘democracy’, but I can honestly say the reactions have been 100% favourable.
Hold on to your seats, because there’s more to come!
Jacqui and all at fotoLibra — impressed. Superbly done! A great visual concept — I love it. —Keith Erskine
The new Picture Call tab — I think it is superb. —Philippa Wood
Yep, love the Picture Call tab. Very clever to split out all my entries above all the rest and incorporating the brief makes it entirely user friendly. Well done. —Phil Dickson
I liked the additions to the site — well done. —Peter Vallance
The new Picture Call tab looks and feels excellent. —Nick Jenkins
The new Picture Call tab is great. This was a great addition to the fotoLibra web site. Thanks for a great site that helps us market our work. —Jim Walker

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   Photoshop Strips Metadata
   April 1st, 2009 
  


   
  
   by Gwyn Headley  
Managing Director  
   Tags: Adobe, captions, CS3, CS4, key words, keywords, metadata, Photoshop, removes metadata, strip, strips out
Why aren’t we rioting in the streets?
18 months ago I posted a blog complaining that Adobe Photoshop CS3, a tool used by all sides of the picture business, removed metadata such as captions, descriptions and key words from images processed in Photoshop. Which means almost every image.
fotoLibra member John Strain got in touch with us to complain that the latest version, Adobe Photoshop CS4, also strips metadata.
I have recently uploaded several pictures to fotoLibra but found that the metadata did not transfer from Photoshop CS4 to fotoLibra when using fotoLibra DND. This has happened on previous occasions in the odd instance but this time a whole batch had no metadata attached. There are ways around this, rather than having to type all the data in again in to each image window, by copying and pasting but for some reason CS4 does not seem to allow “file info” information to be copied, which is a bit of a bind. You used to be able to copy and paste the information from CS3 but not it seems in CS4. So when it happens now, I type in keywords in to the fotoLibra window for one image and then copy and paste from there if the other images can use the same keywords and delete or add words as necessary.
I wondered if you had come across this before. I don’t know if it is a CS4 problem that meta data is not transferring or a general one.
Well frankly we feel it’s a complaint that should be made to Adobe, as there’s nothing fotoLibra can do about it. So we told him so (nicely, I hope) and he went off to talk to Adobe.
He came back to say:
I have just had a word with Adobe technical support and they were able to help to a degree.
Apparently the metadata cut/copy and paste issue answer is that right clicking on words to cut or copy just doesn’t work. The agent said that metadata is dealt with by a different company from Adobe and the ability to right click on words has not been built in to CS4. He didn’t know why that was and thought it unlikely that it was something which would be addressed.
He pointed out however, that pressing Control + C followed by right click and paste does work. It is a strange anomaly.
In respect of metadata not transferring to fotoLibra I got much the same answer as you did. He said that Photoshop does not support the transferring of metadata to a third-party application. I told him that it sometimes works but usually doesn’t. He suggested that your “page” that might not have been fully updated for CS4. I told him that it was also an issue with CS3 and he suggested that you contact him about it as it may be something which needs to be addressed. I asked for a reference so that you could take it from there if you wish and they would know what it was about but he declined to open a “case” as he said it would be something which fotoLibra would have to raise with them direct. I didn’t get as far as mentioning that you had tried to do so before.
So it does seem to be a recognised problem which Adobe has so far not addressed. It will be helpful though when metadata has not transferred, to be able to copy the words from the file information in the picture and paste them into fotoLibra as I used to be able to do with CS3.
I hope that all this might prove useful to anyone else having similar problems.
I would love to discuss this with the gentleman from Adobe, but I have no way of contacting him. We know the past two releases of Photoshop strip out the phoographers’ metadata. They seem to know it too. Why aren’t they doing anything about it?
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC, the body that specifies metadata standards) has published a list of Software supporting IPTC photo metadata standards IIM and “IPTC Core” that very clearly omits Adobe CS3 and CS4. So it would appear to be a commercial decision of Adobe’s part not to support it.
Why aren’t we rioting in the streets?
Oh. I’ve just heard we are.

300,000 up!

It’s got to be today

Danish Photographer Off The Job

Yahoo Blocks Our Emails

Why Pay More?

The perils of publishing

The sites I’ve seen

Shots of Redemption

The New Picture Call Tab

Photoshop Strips Metadata

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