Posts Tagged ‘fotoLibra’
A heritage in photography
May 27th, 2009by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Getting Ready for e-Books and Graphics
May 15th, 2009by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Amazon’s Kindle is now allowing blogs to be posted. Here’s one user’s experience, which can be read in full at http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4341.html:
When I looked at the preview of what my blog looked like in the Kindle after adding my first blog to the system, I was shocked at the terrible quality.
First of all, it was black and white. My blog has pictures and on the Kindle they were not just black and white, they were low resolution black and white. It changed my carefully chosen font to a Times New Roman. In short it looked horrible. Sure, you can get away with a black and white eBook Reader for books, but if you are going to add other content, you need it to be full color or it just looks ghastly (or you are asking bloggers to come up with a special Kindle design, which is an unreasonable expectation).
It was at that moment, staring at that horribly ugly preview of my blog that it hit me. This is clearly a job for Apple.
Rumours of Apple working on an e-book reader have intensified over the past few months. Would it be like a big slender iPhone? Will it actually come? Or is this just wishware?
To many people, me included, the look and feel of a thing is as almost as important as the content. If I see my work in Times New Roman (a wonderful typeface, drowned by ubiquity) I feel physically sick. Fonts are the clothes words wear, as I quoted in my Encyclopaedia of Fonts.
And from fotoLibra’s point of view, the sooner we have colour e-books the sooner we can sell images to e-book publishers.
It will happen. So we are preparing for it.
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Pilots of light aircraft are passionate about flying. In clubs all over the country you’ll find private pilots just longing for a reason to take to the air. And the passenger seat of a Cessna or other high-winged aircraft is perfect for aerial photography … you can even open the window to avoid the plexiglas blur you get in most low-winged craft.
So, one sunny morning when it’s not too blustery, take yourself off to a flying club near to the landmark, view or whatever else you fancy shooting from the air and start chatting up the friendly pilots in the clubhouse. And before long, as long as you have a head for heights and a calm disposition, you’ll be up with the birds.
— posted by Yvonne Seeley
Search Engines and fotoLibra
April 30th, 2009by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We had an email from fotoLibra member Jon Lees this morning. He wrote
I uploaded a image (Belfast Duck Tours) on Tuesday, supplied several keywords and a title. I ran a Google search on the subject matter this afternoon and did not get one fotoLibra hit. In fact there are not many hits on this subject matter, the business website and old newspaper article from an earlier press release, so in theory finding my picture should be very easy? Similarly searching for my photo of the Marine Current Turbine fails to generate any hits without mentioning fotoLibra in the search. Is this then a failing of the website, or are sales not generated this way? I must admit I know little about how search engines generate their information, but surely there must be a way of raising the site profile?
Given that the Google search robot alone uses up 4 gigabytes of our bandwidth every month trawling the fotoLibra site, we asked our Technical Development Manager Damien to respond. This is what he wrote:
What we aim to do is to improve the fotoLibra user experience for both buyers and sellers.
Search engines have hundreds of thousands sites to crawl every day, and many of them have thousands of pages. Though we give them instructions to help them find pages or combinations they would not necessarily guess, and try to add and present as much as possible relevant and descriptive data — we recently added metadata, categories, and collection names, which they would not have guessed — we can’t force, or even suggest to them, what they should do.
So they sometimes crawl aimlessly. They simply visit, so to speak.
But they usually have something precise in mind, and will query terms they know they don’t have enough relevant data about. And they do the same on other websites. Once they’ve gathered data, they are the ones who finally “decide” what and who is to rank higher, using complex algorithms.
This process can take weeks.
We can’t force them. They might feel we’re trying to fool them.
So what is important is: relevant and correctly spelled keywords. Informative, concise captions AND descriptions, in good English. Search engines just can’t analyse what’s in a picture, yet. They rely on the surrounding text which is expected to be descriptive. And search engines “prefer” good English, and tend to ban what they call “keyword stuffing”.
Another crucial point: other sites have to link to fotoLibra. We have to be the site people talk about.
Photographers’ sites have to link to us. fotoLibra has a wide range of very professional and specific pictures: specialised sites have to link to pictures on this particular domain too.
And so should forums, blogs, articles or anything that deals with picture researchers.
Because people interested in the subject read them, and they’re crawled by the search bots as well.
So, if anyone wants his pictures to be more likely to rank higher, he also has to post on forums or blogs or whatever he likes and uses to share his passion, and to tell people that he’s got amazing, rare, high quality pictures on that given subject, and that they are available at this place which has got hundreds of great pictures of his: fotoLibra.
There is no magical receipe. We’re trying to present and emphasize what’s good in it. If it helps the user finding images he’s looking for, the search engine will feel it does too. We’re targeting the improvement of user experience rather than being rigidly search engine compliant, like a porn site. The pictures are getting increasingly accurately described. The Pro Search tool is always improving. Then it gets better for everyone. That’s part of our job.
We have great quality images that people won’t find because they’re poorly captioned or keyworded. That’s the responsibility of fotoLibra’s members.
Good images must be advertised and talked about. People have to spread the world around the web, and elsewhere.
And that’s a part of all our jobs.
300,000 up!
April 17th, 2009by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
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:
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!