Archive for the ‘About fotoLibra’ Category
Very Welsh
November 14th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Tags: Bernd Jürgens, Billy Waqar, Camille Sersou, Dan Clemo, Georgiana Mitrus, Karin Eide, Khadija Hmidouch, Kihindei Adai, Michael Toglia, Mohammed Zoll-Khan, Mokhtar Daud, Natalia Mazo, Parlin Silitonga, Philippe Mathon, Piotr Marcinski, Poh-Leng Yeoh, Richard Se, Ruan Fourie, Victoria Izrailova, Vun Sookiong, Waseem Iqbal, Winston Dobres, Zubaer Malik
When we started fotoLibra a few years ago in the depths of rural Wales (dial-up internet, 28k modem) we expected that among our members such as Eifion ap Llwyd Dafis, Nick Jenkins, Dai Williams, Llinos Jones, Rhodri Cadwaladr and so on we might get a few foreign-sounding names such as John Smith, Paddy Murphy or Iain Macdonald.
This week alone we’re proud to welcome among our new members Zubaer Malik; Poh-Leng Yeoh; Winston Dobres; Waseem Iqbal; Piotr Marcinski; Camille Sersou; Bernd Jürgens; Khadija Hmidouch; Parlin Silitonga; Ruan Fourie; Philippe Mathon; Mohammed Zoll-Khan; Karin Eide; Natalia Mazo; Vun Sookiong; Kihindei Adai; Victoria Izrailova; Georgiana Mitrus; Michael Toglia; Billy Waqar; Dan Clemo; Mokhtar Daud and Richard Se.
I love it, love it, love it. fotoLibra is creating, as I’d always hoped, a worldwide community (though I hate that word!) of photographers who know they’re good enough to get recognised, and fotoLibra is the vehicle that can do it for them.
I hope you all find the fotoLibra experience enjoyable and profitable. A very warm welcome to you all.
Digital Railroad Closes
October 30th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We’re sorry to hear that the picture library portal Digital Railroad has had to close down.
An announcement on their web site reads:
“October 28, 2008
To our valued Members and Partners:
We deeply regret to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down.
On October 15th we reported that the company had reduced its staff and was aggressively pursuing additional financing and/or a strategic partner. Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore Digital Railroad has been forced to close all operations.
Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.
Thank you for allowing us to serve the photographic community these past few years. “
If you have placed picture requests or searches with Digital Railroad, please remember that fotoLibra has 20,000 photographers in 150 countries who are able to supply images of any description.
Please contact me with your picture research needs: gwyn.headley@fotoLibra.com, +44 20 8348 1234.
We’ll do what we can to help.
If you know of any photographers who have been affected by the closure, please tell them that fotoLibra offers the same service as Digital Railroad did, at less than half the price.
Off the rails?
October 24th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I was sorry to hear on my return from a very successful Frankfurt Book Fair that one of our fellow picture libraries, Digital Railroad, is feeling the pinch. In an announcement dated October 15th they wrote:
“For the past few weeks, Digital Railroad (DRR) has been seeking additional funding required to sustain its current level of operations.
“To date, those efforts have been unsuccessful. As a result, effective October 15, 2008, the company has initiated a reduction in staff and expenses while it continues the funding effort. Nevertheless, Digital Railroad is committed to the continued support of its customers through this period and has retained adequate staff to support both member archives and image licensing sales.”
It’s a tough world, and Digital Railroad has burned its way through a massive amount of cash since they launched with a big fanfare a couple of years ago, following the model created by fotoLibra. Alas when we started we were unable to raise anything like the prodigious sums DRR later claimed, so we had to trim our coat according to our cloth.
We made sure our site worked. We made sure the right sort of buyers knew about us. We have expanded and expended carefully. We remain poor. We’ll always be cautious, because we can only guess at what awaits us in the future, and we won’t know for sure until we get there. But we made sure our foundations were as solid as they could be before rushing into rapid world-domineering expansion.
And we’re still not rushing. We intend to be around for a long time to come. We’re not actively seeking additional funding (though a little would be nice, if you fancy it) but we are steadily growing. I believe we now have more photographers on our books than any other picture library.
Digital Railroad charges $50 (£31.15) a month for membership, or you can get a 30 day free trial.
fotoLibra is free in perpetuity, although the precise equivalent of the DRR membership, fotoLibra’s Platinum Membership, costs $24.07 (£15) a month. Which is less than half the price.
Either they got their maths wrong, or we did.
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I’m going to bang on about resolution again.
The only reason we ask for all uploaded images to have their resolution set to 300 ppi is for consistency. We deliver product to professionals, and if they know that every image they download from us will always be 300 ppi and will always have its profile set to Adobe RGB (1998) then we maintain the image of being A Reliable Source in their minds.
Hang on, I’ve just thought of a second reason. It’s a little hurdle for members to step over. If anyone could upload anything to fotoLibra (which they can) without thinking (which they can’t) we would, as several Eeyores predicted, be hosting a lot of dross, instead of what is probably the most eclectic, creative and visually satisying collection of images to be found on the web.
We had members complaining that their perfectly legal 300 ppi images were being rejected by fotoLibra on the grounds they were 0 ppi or 72 ppi. The problem seemed to have no pattern. Some members have never had a moment’s worry uploading to fotoLibra. Others were cursing and screaming with frustration, with every photograph being rejected. We asked to see samples and although some were perfectly legit, many of them were very clearly 72 ppi.
Then two members in a row mentioned they were using Canon EOS cameras. Desperate to seize on any coincidence, we emailed everyone who had suffered difficulty uploading in the last few months.
You guessed it. They all had Canon EOS cameras.
So Damien reconfigured the site and as far as we can tell, all those EOS uploads are now being magically accepted. I hope the problem is over.
Wait a sec. Reason #3. This is the most cynical, exploitative and political reason of them all. And I’m confessing to it? Yes, because I’m not cynical, exploitative or political. In Britain during World War II houseowners were encouraged to make a visible public display of their sacrifice and commitment to the war effort by giving up their iron railings to make Spitfires.
But Spitfires weren’t made from wrought iron. The rumour persists that it was all a scam; the metal was never used, it was merely a political device to bond the country in sacrifice. And I’ve said all along that resolution isn’t important or even relevant as an indicator of the quality of the image — it’s the pixel dimensions that count. So fotoLibra members can bond together by uploading 300 ppi images.
It’s good for you.
Nice one
September 24th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
There’s a fascinating photo blog called Photopreneur, clearly about making money from photographs, and they’ve just run a really good article on fotoLibra.
It’s pretty accurate as well, apart from me saying we’d only rejected four images in the whole time since we started, but when I pointed this out to the writer, it was corrected the next time I looked. Pretty impressive.
How do we go about getting more articles like that? Journalists always say they want to write about something new, different and exciting, but when they get round to filing their articles it’s the same old diet of Google, Flickr and Facebook.
Any suggestions? Or are any journalismos reading this? I’m happy to talk!
Cheerio Neil!
September 23rd, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Next to me, Yvonne, Llinos and of course Jacqui, Neil has been our longest serving staffer. So it was sad to see him stride off to exciting new challenges last Friday. He’s been with us for nearly three years, joining us part time while he was still at Uni, then coming on board as soon as he graduated.
We’ve been lucky to have him. He’s highly intelligent and competent, he swims in the Ocean of Common Sense every day, and he was damn good at his job. We didn’t want to lose him, but you can’t argue with a 300% salary hike.
Mind you, everyone in his new Soho-based office is allegedly bald; whether by choice or design we can’t say. It’s probably stress. We find the office cat does much to relieve the load.
Bodoni using Neil’s desk as a motorway
Hang about — he told me he was a dog lover. Maybe that’s why he left?
Anyway Damien, our new Technical Development Manager, is settling in well. Thanks to him, fotoLibra members and buyers can now riffle through collections and lightboxes of image previews with speed and ease.
And the cat loves him.
Interesting times
September 16th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Lehman Brothers collapses.
Corbis lays off 175 jobs.
Photoshelter closes its Collection, a fotoLibra copy which launched itself in September 2007 by grandly announcing itself as The First Online Marketplace To Provide Professional and Amateur Photographers An Opportunity to Sell Their Images to Commercial Buyers. Not remotely true, but more on that later.
A comment by MarcW on the Photopreneur blog hit the nail on the head — Photoshelter made the mistake of believing what buyers told them. Buyers always demand new, exciting, cutting edge work, but they buy conventional and they buy safe. Pollsters for any forthcoming election in Photoshelter’s home country should bear this in mind; there’s even a term for it when it happens in a racial context: The Bradley Effect.
It’s little to do with race, it’s the person being polled who wants to appear smart / cool / savvy / unprejudiced / avantgarde in the eyes of another human being, the pollster. So of course buyers are going to be seen and heard asking for images on the edge. It’s true, they love to look at them, but that’s not what they have to buy. Don’t poll the picture buyers, ask the shareholders in the companies they work for.
Several Photoshelter photographers have approached us to ask if they can transfer their images to fotoLibra. We welcome them with open arms and we’ve contacted Photoshelter to ask how we can facilitate the move, but there hasn’t been any response from them as yet. That’s understandable, I suppose; I sympathise and commiserate with Photoshelter’s staff who must be hurting a lot at the moment. If any Photoshelter members read this, perhaps you could ask them about transfers as well?
Any diminution in the picture sales business lessens us as well, because we are part of it, but Photoshelter’s claim is patently untrue, as fotoLibra was doing this in beta as far back as April 2004 and has been doing it increasingly successfully since January 2005. fotoLibra was incontestably the first open access picture library, The First Online Marketplace To Provide Professional and Amateur Photographers An Opportunity to Sell Their Images to Commercial Buyers, but We Didn’t Use Quite As Many Capital Letters. We now have 19,000+ members in 150 countries.
But hubris (and shaky research) meant Photoshelter could make false claims like this — we don’t have time to contest them because we’re too busy selling pictures, which I guess may have contributed to Photoshelter’s downfall. Those cows don’t milk themselves, you have to go out and greet them, on behalf of all your photographers.
Duty and responsibility, I guess.
40 Miles Of Bad Seas
September 12th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
It was a bad day for the picture library business yesterday, or stock agencies as they’re erroneously called in the US. Bill Gates’s perpetually loss-making Corbis slashed 175 jobs, and PhotoShelter is closing its stock agency department PhotoShelter Collection next month. The blame is placed variously on the credit crunch, Getty Images, microstock, bad moon rising, cost of oil, what have you.
We’ve already been approached by some PhotoShelter contributors to see if we can offer a safe harbour for their image collections.
Big ships struggle and sometimes founder in stormy seas. Sprats like fotoLibra certainly get tossed around but usually carry on swimming. We have signed supplier contracts with most major UK book publishers this year, and at next month’s Frankfurt Book Fair we have 51 meetings already lined up. We haven’t got two pennies to rub together, but we’re supplying a great service to our clients and our member photographers are making money from our work.
And one day so will we.
Welcome to Damien
August 21st, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We’ve been looking for good staff (we’re ALWAYS looking for good staff) and when we advertised for a LAMP developer recently (see earlier blog posting) we were inundated with calls from agents, despite the ads clearly stating NO AGENTS.
So I was quite pleased when one called this morning. I told him “We’ve already employed someone; thank you for ignoring our request and calling. We found him through Gumtree.”
He was scathing. “What, has he just walked off the boat?”
“Actually, yes he has,” I grinned. He’s French, with a Master’s degree in computing. And in the forty minute test Neil set for all the applicants, Damien wrote by far the most elegant and economical code.
So we’re happy, and we hope he’ll be happy. The only downside I can see is that he got his new computer today and horror of horrors, it’s running Windows Vista. Ach-y-fi.
LAMP Developer
August 5th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I’m going to have to give up listening to BBC Radio 4 because when they’re not banging on about Islam they’re telling us how the government is going to have to come and shoot us all to prevent us dying of hunger and clogging up the streets during the total meltdown of the world economy. It’s mildly depressing.
While everyone is still in the process of melting down, fotoLibra is employing more staff. We’re always looking for great sales people, but at the moment we’re particularly searching for a really hot LAMP developer.
So we advertised in all the right places, and specified in the ads NO AGENCIES. We’ve had about 40 replies, 15 from people wanting to work in the UK and 25 from employment agencies.
Either they can’t read, or they are ignoring our request.
Before we placed the ads, we actually went to an agency specialising in such placements. We approached Them. They sent us a really nice young man. We put him in front of a computer for a coding test and it was clear he was troubled by the sight of a keyboard. The CV his agency sent us said he had 5 years LAMP experience. We asked him what LAMP stood for. He hadn’t got a clue*.
Another agency applicant said he had 25 years’ experience with PHP, a computer scripting language which was created by a Greenlander (really!) in 1995. That makes it 13 years old.
We got badly bitten in our dealings with a recruitment agency last year. We wanted a sales manager, and I felt that a specialist picture library recruitment agency would be the best bet. Boy, was I wrong. The chap we got was really charming and had a red-hot and hugely relevant CV. He was also the best of the bunch we saw. And in the brief time he was with us, Airbus Industrie sold fourteen times as many A-380s as he sold images. He sold one, to be precise. But, as we had agreed, the agency got very well paid. That was truly a pound of flesh.
So NO AGENCIES. Of course we will be delighted to see the people they are offering us, on the following conditions:
1. No fee
2. Applicants know something about the job they’ve been applied for
Send ’em on!
*Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. The four major disciplines required to maintain and develop the fotoLibra website.