Last week, we introduced a Facebook export feature that allows PhotoShelter users to either send their images to a Facebook album, or post a link on their wall. We received a great reception, but photographers immediately starting asking us for the ability to post to their "Pages."
In case you're unfamiliar with the lingo, Facebook users can set up "Pages" which are separate from their personal profiles. This can be pretty handy for their businesses, hobbies, etc. For example, I know Doug Murdoch, but I'm a fan of his company "Think Tank Photo" which has a page on Facebook.
Here's what the new interface looks like with the "Post on Fan Page" button:
But not only can you post to the Pages you've created, you can also post to the pages of which you are a fan.
Once you select the page destination, you can fill out some text that goes along with the Wall post.
Nifty, right? We think this will save you time by avoiding double uploads. More good stuff is in the pipeline, so stay tuned....
First the obvious: a lot of people use Facebook. Over 300 million people use the service, and it's become the most popular social network. Irrespective about how you feel about Facebook, it's impact is undeniable, and it's ability to act as a marketing tool is becoming increasingly clear.
The business implication became clear to me last year when I posted an album of portraits, and then a "friend" hired me to photograph him. Posting images on Facebook is a way to passively market yourself to a qualified audience for free.
(I know, the terms and conditions are worrisome, but more on that in a second)
So I'm pleased to announce our new "Post to Facebook" feature that we released today. You might say to yourself, "well, duh!" And I would nod my head in agreement. It's an obvious piece of functionality. But we've done it slightly differently than other implementations that I've seen.
From your PhotoShelter gallery, you can click the "send to social networks" link, and then use "Facebook Connect" to link your accounts. Then you have two options:
Post to your Wall: For those of you who don't want to upload content to Facebook because of concerns over their T&C, you can post a link to your Wall with a message. Facebook will display a preview of a few images with a link back to your website. Here's what a wall post looks like:
Upload Images: Alternately, you can actually upload images to Facebook from your gallery. We'll create a new album with the same name as your PS Gallery, then upload the images. After the upload is complete, you get a chance to review the images and set the album permissions before posting them to your "Photos" tab. Just remember that Facebook has a 200 image limit per album.
Pretty nifty, huh? It's a great time saver, and a cool way to go social.
Stay tuned, we have more cool features up our sleeves....
Dinosaurs are huge, mean, and featured in lots of movies. But you might have noticed that dinosaurs are also extinct, and adults don't like them nearly as much as kids. People talk about dinosaurs with nostalgia, like "remember when dinosaurs ruled the world? *lol*"
Even if you don't know much about the K-T boundary and giant meteors slamming into the Mexican Peninsula, there's one thing that scientists agree on: dinosaurs went extinct because they couldn't adapt to the changed environment, which leads me to my next point.
Things are changing in photography, but it's likely that you still have that same old website you had around the turn of the century. You know, the one that just shows pretty pictures that you haven't updated in 3 years. Your website is a dinosaur, but you are a mammal, and mammals can adapt (see mom, that liberal arts education is paying off).
Everyone who sells websites to photographers makes one big claim: your website will help you get more work/clients/new business. In most cases, that's generally false.
Next time you hear that, I've got 1 simple question you should ask: "How?" And if you don't get a straight answer, and you still feel like poking, here are 3 follow up questions. All get to the heart of the matter: how does a website get you more business?
Is the website designed to attract search engine traffic? And just saying "We're SEO friendly" doesn't cut it. Show me how. What tools do you give me to impact my own website's search engine optimization? Can I infuse my website with text that's rich in keywords that my potential customers are searching for? Can I update my content frequently to provide the freshness that search engines love? If you help me attract new users who don't already know me (via search engines), you're helping me get new work.
Does the website motivate or drive visitors to some type of action? This could be purchasing something - a print, stock photo, mousepad. This could be signing up for a newsletter. Follow me on twitter. Request a copy of my photobook. Attend a gallery opening. Register for RSS feeds of site updates. Etc, etc. etc. If there is no way to connect, capture contact info, or complete a goal, your website visitors are simply window shopping. Enable me to convert visitors to contacts/clients in some way and you're helping me get new work.
Can I measure traffic patterns and user behavior? Can I easily optimize based on what I learn? Does the vendor offer an analytics package or can you easily add Google Analytics? If so, once you get all those handy insights - how simple is it to update your site? Let's say you learn that the images you're featuring on your main page are not as compelling as the new work you produced last week. Do you need to find a really talented designer with snappy flash skills, pay them a few hundred dollars for their time? If so, that's a real shame. A website that gives you the ability to constantly measure, learn and constantly optimize...that helps you get more work.
If someone tells you, "we make your photos look good online" - sure, that's a big help. Thanks very much. But that's not helping you with smart new ways to market yourself, display your photos, attract more visitors, and generate new business. And if you're still using the website you built with Adobe Page Mill in 199, you're basically doing the equivalent of photographing with a camera you built yourself.
We've been hard at work on several new features that address this important need - and we're releasing a few of these today. (Hint: there's even more to come.) Let's discuss:
WORDPRESS INTEGRATION VIA GRAPH PAPER PRESS Graph Paper Press (GPP) makes some gorgeous themes for WordPress blogs. We're partnering with GPP to bring you a fully integrated blog/website/archive experience for your users. When you put these two powerful tools together, you get a really elegant way to display your photos, an SEO machine, and a completely seamless user experience that unites your blog, portfolio, and searchable, e-commerce friendly archive. Pretty powerful stuff, right? Here's what we're doing specifically - you can now:
Easily customize PhotoShelter to tie in with GPP's popular Modularity theme, with more themes to come!
Post your PhotoShelter images directly to your Graph Paper Press site - no more double uploads to WordPress!
Blow out your SEO with frequently-updated, text-rich content that search engines love - across your Graph Paper Press front-end and PhotoShelter.
Get crafty with a bunch of cool plugins and widgets by Graph Paper Press for an even deeper PhotoShelter integration - like a PhotoShelter search widget and recently updated gallery display.
Here's a quick example - Jack Gruber's Graph Paper Press theme and his PhotoShelter account are integrated, so visitors to jackgruber.com can navigate across both destinations seamlessly.
Read more on combining Graph Paper Press and PhotoShelter, plus a 30% discount offer for PhotoShelter members. If you don't have a WordPress.org blog yet and want to get started, check out http//visualsociety.com - a hosted WordPress service with all their GPP themes and plug-ins built in, brought to you by the gang at Graph Paper Press.
We're looking for more examples to feature - so if you're an early adopter, please share your site!
SLIDEHOW: NOW BETTER LOOKING AND MORE CUSTOM OPTIONS Our embeddable gallery slideshow just got much better. You now have much more control to customize the slideshow - including color, sizing, scrolling thumbnail display, image transitions, removing the borders and captions and more. This gives you a much more elegant way to display slideshows, and you can play with it until you're perfectly content. Want to get rid of the borders completely, blow it up huge, and run a band of thumbnails across the bottom. Do it! Care for a transparent background so your vertical images don't look weird? Done. Want to shrink it down, color the border purple, have bouncing image transitions, and display captions for every image? Er, go for it.
Let me show you what I mean. Here's the original, default slideshow from our buddy Kike Calvo in Panama.
For those just joining us, another fun part of our embeddable slideshow is that you can grab the embed code and pass it around online like a YouTube video. No matter where the slideshow ends up, all clicks go back to your website. It's another way to extend your marketing reach online.
Today you can embed the slideshow in blogs and any HTML site (including your PhotoShelter manual customization) - and we're building it into each of our themes now, so check back soon for more fun!
So, back to helping you get more work. Our goal here is to constantly produce new tools that really do give you the power to market yourself and generate more business through your photography website - whether you're shooting weddings, nature and travel stock, concerts, football, global conflict, or little league. Yeah, we also like to give you fantastic looking ways to display photos too. But if you want to succeed in a changing industry, you need to realize that marketing your photography business online is about so much more than simply showing pretty pictures.
Today we're proud to announce our latest selection of featured photographers, whose vibrant work will be displayed in the "Images" tab of the PhotoShelter homepage slideshow throughout the month of June.
Like what you see? Embed our June featured slideshow in your own website or blog by clicking the up arrow in the lower right of the above widget.
As always, we're thrilled about the quality of the submissions and strongly encourage you to keep sending them our way! (**Note: Please pay attention to the guidelines if you want to be considered - this is necessary for us to keep the review process efficient. Images must be submitted by the 20th of the month, and winners are posted on the first Tuesday of the following month.)
We want to help with your local photography events, contests, and seminars.
One of the reasons I really like getting out to local photography events is to meet people who are trying new things - like sweet gear, software, or even unique marketing approaches. Throughout the year, I'll get out for a few really good speakers and book launches too. But, I'll admit, nothing draws a crowd quite like the words "open bar". Wouldn't it be nice if your next event could have a few bottles of wine to get people mixing it up? Or maybe this summer you'll spring for a few raffle prizes and a better speaker? A better venue that has air conditioning? Pro models and real lighting for your next shootout?
Photo by Allen Murabayashi
My point is, we all go to photo events throughout the year, and most local organizations (yes, even in NYC) usually have to cut a few corners when getting everyone together. So, if you're planning an event, we want to help you make it better. With this in mind, today we're announcing the PhotoShelter Stimulus Plan.
If you have a great event in the works, apply for support from PhotoShelter.
We're looking for local organizations (or individuals) that are helping keep the spirit of photography alive and vibrant in communities everywhere. We have a small budget for event sponsorships - $500 every month - and can also provide speakers, prizes, discounts, judging platforms for contest, and temporary group accounts for displaying a group's collective work. Depending on your event needs and how strong of a match it is for us, there are plenty of creative ways to get PhotoShelter involved.
Yes, we realize that $500/month and some raffle prizes are not necessarily going to change the face of the industry. For us, this is more about connecting with good people, supporting events that push photography forward, and a little good karma at a time we know it can be appreciated.
Oh, and it's no surprise that we're favoring requests by PhotoShelter members. We'll review requests monthly, so if you're currently planning something, submit our request form now.
If you don't have an event immediately in the works, but you are an organizer of a local group - get in touch anyway and introduce yourself - we'd love to hear more about you and your organization.
We'll keep the community informed regularly about events we're supporting via our blog and twitter.
Paul Jeffrey's Darfur I don't want to trivialize the potential for the H1N1 flu virus to mutate and spread into something much more virulent. But less than 35 people have died worldwide and only a few thousand people have been diagnosed with the illness. Yet, because it reaches across borders, the media coverage in the past few weeks has been staggering.
By contrast, the genocide in Darfur has claimed the lives of over 400,000 people and displaced another 2 million in a few years. Reporting on the Darfur crisis takes dedication and experience that only real journalists can bring to the table. This isn't the paparazzi getting shots of David Hasselhoff passed out on the floor. This is covering a story with a purpose, and trying to bring light to a story that might otherwise get buried by those who don't want it to be known -- namely, the Sudanese government.
PhotoShelter user Paul Jeffrey and journalist Chris Herlinger recently published "Where Mercy Fails -- Darfur's Struggle to Survive" with a foreward by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Instead of just photos and text of burnt down villages, Jeffrey takes a humanitarian viewpoint in showing how the crisis has affected the population in camps, schools, farms, and other areas of daily life. Check out their website now.
Setting up a CNAME with your domain registar allows you to mask the photoshelter.com domain from your customized website. Depending on your registrar, the process of creating a CNAME can range from simple to excruciating.
PhotoShelter user Bruno Vincent struggled with creating a CNAME through his UK-based provider 1and1, but finally got it all working. He wrote a fantastic tutorial, which is bound to save 1and1 users a lot of time and angst.
Ready to make us all look good? Want a little more exposure through PhotoShelter? Ever wonder how the slideshow images get selected for the PhotoShelter homepage? Now you can be chosen as one of 20 PhotoShelter Featured Photographers every month, and your work will appear on our homepage and throughout our website.
The goods:
If you are selected, one outstanding photo from your live galleries will be included in the "Images" tab on our new homepage slideshow.
A screenshot of your PhotoShelter website/gallery, brief info about you, and a link to your website will be included on the "Examples" tab in our new product tour.
You and your image will be included in a blog post announcing the month's 20 Featured Photographers.
This new exposure opportunity will provide a little extra boost in marketing your photography, and will help us share more great examples of photographers succeeding with PhotoShelter - whether you're selling photos with our tools, displaying your work with our websites, or simply backing up your archive.
We're looking for striking individual imagery that represents our talented and diverse photographer base. Featured Photographers must have a PhotoShelter Basic, Standard, or Pro account to qualify. Simple submission details
March's Featured Photographers Congrats to our first group of Featured Photographers. They're all great examples of strong photographers of varying specialties and experience levels, each making PhotoShelter an important part of their digital photography success story. You can see their work in the below slideshow or read up on them in our new "Examples" section.
It feels really good to be back working full-time on the PhotoShelter Personal Archive again. It is, and always has been, our core product - it is healthy and strong and there's nothing else like it.
I am actually legitimately excited right now about all the upgrades we are about to inject into the Personal Archive. (That's right! Legitimately excited!) Our engineers are busy putting the finishing touches on things as I type this, and you'll get to see everything for yourself this month, in a few weeks, before the start of PhotoPlus Expo (which starts October 23 - we've got a large booth space -- #1808, so visit us.)
Here are my personal favorite updates:
1) Customization Templates. If you love the power of PhotoShelter's Seamless Customization system, but don't love all that HTML and CSS that comes with it, you're going to love what's coming. The process couldn't be easier and the templates, or "Themes", are nice and clean. The engineers showed it to me in action today, and I can't wait for us to roll this baby out for everyone.
2) Upgrades to the Virtual Agency feature. The Virtual Agency enables a series of independent photographers to "link" their archives together so that they can form a "virtual agency" of their own. The VA is getting an overhaul, will contain a host of new features, and one big huge surprise that I can't mention just yet -- but I am DYING to tell. (This is torture.) Let's just say that I expect people to really love the VA and there won't be any excuse not to use it. :)
3) New PhotoShelter Uploader. What's special about this version is that it allows threading. Translation: No more waiting for through that pesky "Processing Image..." period. Images will just immediately send one after the other without delay - which means even-faster uploads are coming. (Less time uploading means you'll have more time for beer.)
4) Member Forum. You'll finally be able to chat with other PhotoShelter Users right through the member forum. The forum will be broken down into a few different sections, and is similar to the message board we had within the PSC. If you're a fan of forums, but you've only got a free PhotoShelter account, you will be able to read the messages, but you won't be able to post. It will be a place for people to talk about all topics related to the business and art of professional photography.
5) Navigation Improvements. Getting around the site will be quicker, more intuitive, and very simple. Can I get a big "Yay!" for simplicity? Oh yeah.
6) PA Gallery Widget. We created a similar feature within the PSC, and it went over so well that we thought we should make the same thing possible within the PA. This will allow you to take a gallery of images, and create a widget that can be embedded in a website, blog, or even Facebook. You can go totally nuts and create one for every one of your public galleries if you want. Clicking on the widget will take you to the gallery itself within your PhotoShelter Archive. Super cool stuff alert!
We will be showing off these updates, and more, in our booth at PhotoPlus Expo, in New York City. If you do, I'll be happy to show you what I look like when I am "Legitimately Excited.
We have typically used the blog to inspire and congratulate. Today is atypical.
When we started to envision The PhotoShelter Collection in early 2007, we went out and conducted research to understand the needs of photo buyers. We consistently heard from a myriad of sources that they were disappointed with stock photography because it lacked diversity and realness. We talked to a number of photographers that wanted to get into the stock photography game, but didn't know where to start. They were good photographers, but not full-time stock photographers, and therefore they were largely ineligible to play with the traditional agencies.
We believed that we could create a more democratic system - a marketplace for stock photography where virtually any one could participate. And a few months later, The PhotoShelter Collection was born. Upload your images, keyword & price, attach the appropriate releases, and voila! You were now a stock photographer.
Despite the naysayers, the photography was actually quite good. A number of stock executives and consultants corroborated this fact, and we felt good about being able to provide imagery that had largely been unseen and unlicensed before. The pricing was fair, and photographers received the majority of the sale.
We knew that sales would be challenging, but we honestly underestimated the complexity of sales. Licensing photography isn't like selling a widget on eBay. It's intellectual property fraught with clearance issues. Here are a few key learnings:
1. Stock photography is a slow growing market dominated by a single player There was a single moment for a company to capitalize in stock photography, and Getty took it. The use of stock imagery isn't growing fast enough to create a displacement opportunity, and Getty is far too aggressive (and smart) to allow secondary players to displace them in any fashion.
2. Research Requests move too quickly for individuals to react in a timely fashion We believed that using the crowd to fulfill research requests would give us an enormous advantage over the competition, but the nature of the industry is such that many research requests are due within a day, making it nearly impossible for non-fulltime stock photographers to react. Research requests are therefore relegated to what they've always been - namely the locating of existing images within an extant library that are ready for immediate licensing.
3. Buyers desire more diversity, but convenience (aka subscription deals) triumphs this desire The largest consumers of stock photography are often locked into subscription deals, which makes it very difficult for them to consider alternate sources. Subscription deals are very bad for photographers, but great for business.
4. A crowd-source model for stock will likely never work Licensing a photo is not a simple proposition. It is not like selling a widget. There are huge intellectual property issues, technical issues, and meta data issues that are difficult for even full-time pros to grasp. Companies that represent collections of stock photography have to build entire divisions of staff to deal with rights clearances and lawsuit that arise from improper clearance.
Despite these odds, we did make incredible in-roads to agencies and publications alike. But when we viewed our growth over the past few months, we became all too aware that our trajectory wasn't putting us on the right path. And despite repeated attempts to alter our trajectory, we were unable to substantially change it. Even though we are in the midst of our best month ever of sales, we believe that the growth trend isn't step enough to sustain the stock photography business in the long term.
So we are exiting the stock photography marketplace, and getting back to our roots with the Personal Archive, which still gives individual photographers the tools to market and license their images themselves. That business is doing quite nicely, and we look forward to continuing to support photographers and photography.
The pundits will surely say "I told you so." And maybe we will end up being just a tiny footnote in the history of photography, but on the other hand, we were also the largest aggregation of photographers participating in stock photography ever (And no, I do not count those places where a photo sell for $1. I remain defiantly stubborn on the microstock front as ever). We never assumed that this would be easy. Quite to the contrary. And yet, it was a goal worth fighting for. Tonight, I'm going to bed knowing that we tried something that had never been tried - a way to provide photographers with something they hadn't had in a long time: a fair deal and respect.
"PhotoShelter has found a better approach to stock photography. We're crushing old industry standards by treating photographers fairly. That's why 37,000 photographers from 130 countries are gathered here to provide the most fresh, diverse and authentic image offering available today. We're changing the image marketplace for good."
Communication Arts is the design bible for the industry. I remember picking up a few copies in college and thinking how ludicrous it was to pay so much for a single issue! But I couldn't help it. It was so beautifully designed!
The advance time for doing print ads is, of course, long. So allow me to update the photographer numbers (42,000) and the countries (162). Now you're up to date. Fresh Never Gets Old.
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