Meet Lattice: A New Photo Project from PhotoShelter

Meet Lattice: A New Photo Project from PhotoShelter

Today, we’re launching the first phase of a special new project from our team here at PhotoShelter. It’s called Lattice. With Lattice, our mission is simple — to connect people with the photos they love and the creators behind those photos.

The background…

Over nearly a decade, we’ve cultivated a community of more than 80,000 professional photographers who rely on PhotoShelter to store, display, share and sell their work. Across this community, we now host 200 million images. We believe this to be the world’s largest pool of images captured by professional photographers.

But, looking out across the community and the incredible imagery uploaded to PhotoShelter every day, we still felt something was missing. We wanted to create a way to help our photographers better attract and engage a larger audience, and specifically, people who care about our photographers’ content. I’m talking about picture professionals working on projects, as well as photo consumers with a passion for images of very specific subject matters that can be found across our community.

Enter Lattice: a visually stunning way to discover and curate photography by PhotoShelter photographers. In one place, Lattice achieves a number of very important goals:

1) Lattice gives PhotoShelter a new way to gather and showcase our members’ amazing photography.

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2) Lattice creates a destination where people who love photography can find, curate and buy powerful images to suit any theme, project or passion.

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The Critically Endangered Species Lattice board

3) Lattice enables our photographers to directly present fresh, undiscovered imagery to a targeted audience of curators and followers.

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The BBQ Lattice board

Lattice is a creative experience. It’s uniquely collaborative and super useful. It’s also a ton of fun.

How Lattice works…

With Lattice, visitors to PhotoShelter can find and save publicly searchable images from our community. We call this curating a Lattice board. In this first phase, curation will be by invitation only.

PhotoShelter photographers can then suggest additional images that may be a strong fit for any board. We call this contributing to the board’s stream. The curator can review the stream and decide to promote images from the stream to the board.

All the while, any Lattice visitor can follow boards they like to get regular alerts when new work is added. To me, this creates a perfect loop between the content consumer and our photographers. From a Lattice board, anyone may also directly visit each photographer’s website, contact the photographer, or purchase their photography.

To enjoy Lattice right now…

We’ll be rolling out Lattice in phases, starting with the release of boards and streams as a new way to showcase PhotoShelter members’ incredible imagery. Our staff and invited curators will be building new boards regularly. Check out the dozens of boards our team has created, and follow your favorites. PhotoShelter photographers may instantly begin adding images to streams too. If you’ve got the bug to curate a board, request an invitation here.

What’s coming next…

Starting now, we’ll be watching how visitors and photographers interact with the content, and gathering feedback. This will soon be joined by new, powerful search capabilities and more robust features, as well as opening up curation more broadly.

Building Lattice has been a thrill for our team. It’s a delight to unveil it today.

Andrew & the PhotoShelter Team

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This article was written by

PhotoShelter CEO. Follow on Twitter: @awfingerman and Instagram: @awfinger

There are 17 comments for this article
  1. Patrick Downs at 5:48 pm

    Wow! Pardon me for getting giddy prematurely, but this is exciting at first look. I’ve already added images to one board. In addition, this will motivate me to tighten up my act and make sure my best images are keyworded well and publicly searchable. At first try, I am impressed at how easy it is to navigate and add images. Well done, Photoshelter! Again, I might find something to gripe about as I get more experienced, but I’m excited by this. I will be glad to provide user feedback. Thanks. – Patrick Downs

  2. Paul Foley at 6:14 pm

    Thanks for this fantastic initiative and congrats on all the work done to get Lattice up and running. I am already following a few boards and have added a some images to streams.
    I clicked for an invite to create a board but the link seemed dead (maybe just very busy 🙂 Actually just tried again via link on the blog page and it worked – perhaps it was just the Lattice tab.

    Agree with Patrick Downs about making sure my keywords are relevant. How creatives and buyers name the boards they create will be helpful for key wording.

    cheers
    paul

  3. Martin P Wilson at 7:27 am

    Thanks for providing yet another channel for our images to be ripped off. I resent being opted in without permission when I have my images watermarked.

    I have opted out while I review this “exciting new service” so I can take an informed decision what form my future relationship with PhotoShelter will be.

    • Martin P Wilson at 7:39 am

      It took me barely 2 minutes to grab a 1200 x 800 images with no watermark that is eminently usable in both print and online. This just increases the scope for images to be ripped off I definitely will NOT be taking part. I am not a photographer for ego or “exposure” – I am in it to make a living.

      Lattice undermines my earning potential and increases the workload in searching for sto9len images.

      I AM VERY UNHAPPY with this.

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  6. Jon Lewis at 6:38 am

    Hi
    this is nuts we have a hard enough time already stoping image theft now Photoshelter is helping image pirates with unwatermarked 1200 x 800 px images like Martin I’m in review before I decide whetherI’m out of here.Sorry but you need watermarks

  7. Ant Upton at 9:03 am

    Sounds like a good idea, poorly executed, why is there no option to retain the watermark of your images?

    If this is for the benefit of the people who pay Photoshelter’s fees and keep it it business, then their images and security concerns must take precedence over the ‘user experience’.

    I’d love to have more of my images seen more widely but not at the expense of having them ripped off with no way of it being linked back to me. It only benefits the thief and the Data miners who are selling on the image Metadata.

    Disabling right click will stop a thief for about the time it takes them to ‘Print Screen’ on a PC or to Apple Shift 4 on a Mac to make a perfect copy of the image with NO metadata or way to link back to me, the Copyright holder.

    Until the existing watermark options are enabled by default, then any professional photographer would be mad to take part in the Lattice project.

    Photoshelter is by no means the cheapest option of image hosting and client delivery, therefore it is usually chosen by professional photographers because it offers something that the others don’t, so it doesn’t make sense to alienate your core clients, they’ll just move onto other platforms which don’t treat their clients as commodities to be sold to the BIG DATA companies.

    I think it could be an interesting additional marketplace but the user needs to be able to choose to have watermarks enabled if they want them to be.

  8. Martin P Wilson at 12:42 pm

    Ant,

    I totally agree and it has caused me to start a serious review of the alternatives to PhotoShelter as I have come to feel it is expensive for what it offers.

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  10. Fabio at 4:08 pm

    I agree with with some of the comments. Is it really necessary to delete the watermark? If so, what kind of protection does the photographer have? After all, it is the photographer who is member of Photoshelter.

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