StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

Pixsy: "Next Generation Photo Search Engine"

Constantly new companies are showing up, like Yotophoto (searching for images whose copyright owners allow their works to be used by others), Photoshelter, or Scoopt, a picture agency for citizen reporters.

Another new company is Seattle-based Pixsy. Despite the logo, which raises the question if it´s childish or ingenious (a voice in the background cries: "It´s great! You´re just a too conservative dump cluck!"), Pixsy collects photos and videos from blogs and social networks to "find unique photos the other search engines miss":

Doesn't it seem like most search engines have the same boring content?

Pixsy finds photos and videos you can't find anywhere else on the web.

Google, Yahoo!, and other traditional search engines use something called a "spider" to crawl the web and and find photos.

Pixsy, however, accesses special collections of photos and videos on the Internet through technology partnerships with leading content providers that cannot be crawled by spiders. Pixsy searches blogs, mobile blogs ("moblogs"), social networks, and sites that generate large amounts of compelling photo content and have unique material [through XML feeds]. The result: unique photos and a new method for discovering exciting content on the web.

Pixsy states that "this opens up new ideas and opportunities for users to share stories, create personal connections, inspire new ideas and business partnerships, license photographs, engage in offline experiences, or a variety of other possitibilities, like for use on their desktop or mobile phone or for printing and merchandising.

Pixsy's search results are presented similar to other image searches: images with the originating URL appearing underneath the image. When a result image is clicked, users are taken to a page that features the image link, the originating page link and a representation of the site it was found on. Pixsy also uses image-based contextual ads, which are normally related to the query. (Chris Richardson)

Pixsy, launched July 4th, was founded by Internet veterans -- formerly working for Corbis, Infospace, Microsoft and Sony -- who were frustrated by the lack of unique content found of traditional image search engines.

Co-founder Rich Lerz said, "for publishers and graphic professionals, the image-based search engine provides a new source of images available on the Web. And unlike such proprietary image collections as Corbis and Getty, which either bought an image archive or work directly with professional photographers, Pixsy is a metasearch engine that pulls images from many different content partners and blends the image search results together." (Publish)

Pixsy offers an adult content filter and images gathered from a search include the URL the image originated from. The business model in the background is "an ad-driven business that serves up contextually relevant visual ads when a user types in a query ... the company's longterm plan is to build the largest and most unique metaimage search engine. (Publish)

Said to say, but in the current version of Pixsy there is no number indicating the total amount of images found after a query. Also, with Pixsy it´s not possible to link directly to search results (as possible with Google). Anyway, Pixsy´s a promising idea. But don´t forget: "You must obtain permission from the owner to use any material."

(Thx to Chase Norlin, Co-Founder, Pixsy)

Google Image Search And Professional Photo Researchers

Earlier I  wrote about "Those who attended New Orleans [the PACA meeting on November 2003] will remember the fireworks sparked when one art director said she prefers using GOOGLE" to search for images and "to going to an agency, and then calling photographers directly."

At the recently held CEPIC in Prague Dagmar Fabricius of StockPhotoFinder explained that this incident had been one of the bottom ideas to found the company.

Now Christina Micek writes about "The Advent of Google Image Search and its Affect on Photo Researchers" at MacTribe:

Most people in the imaging world today are aware of an alternative to the ever-popular Google search engine: the Google Image Search. [...]
I have seen people in my field using this tool for a variety of functions [...]

For the professional photo researcher like myself, Google's new and popular image searching capabilities are both a hindrance and an asset when it comes to fulfilling my client's requests. [...]

Are we getting excited yet? One thing that needs to be addressed, if this is going to be the wave of the future for photography, is to put those who need content in touch with those that have content. We need to rethink and reevaluate the way in which images are used on the web. Photographers who have websites need to be aware of metatags, captions, keywords and how they are used with this new tool to maximize appropriate hits.

Nathan Tyler, Google's technology public relations contact, recommends that if photographers are interested in having their images represented in Google Image Search they should evaluate their own websites to make sure there are clear sitemaps that link to every page. They should be easily crawled by search engines and not be behind forms such as ID and PW requests. Frames and dynamically generated pages are also problematic. For more information on this please refer to www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters. I would recommend niche photographers who have specific collections that may not interest more generalized stock photography agencies, increase their sales by working within these constraints. [...]

I love using Google Image Search in my research, and I am often fascinated at where the journey can take me, from speaking to a small group of architectural researchers in Guatemala, to entomologists studying Daddy Long Legs in Great Britain. However, for my ease in licensing these rare and specific images, and for the ease of image creators in getting their best stuff to researchers and buyers, we should all be working together to make the possibilities opened up by the Google Image Search technology to work for us all.

Christina also points out that "when I get stuck finding a source, I often turn to another one of my favorite new search methods, Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), a search engine of scholarly journals. It can show me specific academic articles and sources on a wide range of subject matter from social interactions in Gibbons to fetal brain tissue implants to treat Parkinson's patients."

QuickLinks for the WeekEnd

As always more or less completely off the topic and not in dead earnest:

• 

  Bizarre or ingenious?
  Youblewmyupyoubastard is an new site with a somehow weird mission: "If you're killed by an act of terrorism, the newspapers and television stations will use whatever photo they can. None of these express the anger, the rage, even the disappointment your disembodied spirit will feel at having your life untimely snuffed out.
  That's where YouBlewMeUpYouBastard.com comes in.
  We'll store a photo of you, giving it large at the terrorists what done you in, and in the event of your body being blown to bits by a suicide bomber, we'll supply your disgusted image to all news services. So don't let your death stop you telling the terrorists how much they stink."

• Condom Coloribus has a collection of unusual condom ads, images and illustrations: "Condom use can be traced back to Ancient Egypt and from that time the condom has protected man from disease and infection. New technology has considerably improved the condom and enabled the production of far more sophisticated versions than our ancestors were used to. But nobody would not learn about it, if not advertising."
  "Slacker sperm, remixed Maoist propaganda, and this macabre reminder of what unsafe sex can lead to are among the images you'll see in this collection of unusual condom ads." (Xeni Jardin/BoingBoing)

• California Agency Alleges Brooks Institute of Photography "Willfully" Misled Students: "Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California has allegedly been conducting misleading recruitment practices by promising students they could earn between $50,000 to $150,000 in photography after graduation." (Dennis Dunleavy)

• Happy News is a new citizen journalist website: "'Real News, Compelling Stories, Always Positive' is what you'll find on HappyNews.com. We believe virtue, goodwill and heroism are hot news. That's why we bring you up-to-the-minute news, geared to lift spirits and inspire lives. Add in a diverse team of Citizen Journalists reporting positive stories from around the world, and you've got one happy place for news."
  The Washington Post has a story on how more citizen journalism sites are springing up, including Your Mom Online. (via JD Lascia)

• The "Battle Royale over Royalty-Free" continues here and at the Stock Artist Alliance: Betsy Reid on “Straight Talk on Licensing Models”.

• "Assault on Photography Going From Bad to Worse", just like earlier here, here and here.

• "Speaking of stock photos, is the business of stock video being developed? The still image will always be significant, but streaming footage will likely become the primary content more and more in many realms in the years to come. And, by the way, the stock video business is going to be booming big-time as soon as broadband becomes cheaper and faster." Janna Anderson here at Alan Meckler of JupiterMedia.

• "Video content set free on Web" about the new startup of J.D. Lascia, Ourmedia ("the grassroots media revolution"), which hosts video for free: ""We're still at an early stage of the multimedia-rich Web. The Web is not going to be Web logs and text; it's going to be people posting video and podcasting and taking part in the citizens' media that's just starting to explode." Ourmedia's ultimate goal is not to amass a huge collection of video, but to establish open standards that will make vast multimedia libraries and archives across the Internet accessible through any number of social networks, blog tools, portals and media-sharing sites. [..] "One of our goals is to create an open format for video so that there are no more format wars," Lasica said. "It's crazy right now. It's confusing to people when they can't play video, and it's very frustrating.""

• Videoblogging, the very small private brother of professional footage: "Watch Me Do This and That Online". Sarah Parker/NYT on videobloggers, vloggers and "Can you vlog a dead horse? Only if you make a video of it and post it on the Web."

• In an interview with JD Lascia, the co-founder of the recent founded OurMedia the Boston Globe writes: "It's surprising to learn that only 28,000 Internet users have signed up at Ourmedia, a new Internet service that's giving away both storage and bandwidth, for personal use, at no charge. Any podcaster, text blogger, or video blogger can sign up for a free account at ourmedia.com, and publish as much as he wants, for as long as he wants."

Widget-Mania: Konfabulator Sold to Yahoo

Konfabulator, the company behind the widgets (special mini desktop apps: visual elements on the screen performing a task), had been sold to Yahoo. Konfabulator is now for free.
Currently companies like StockPhotoFinder, Shutterstock and iStockphoto are taking advantage of the widget technology for their customers.
Recently the StockPhotoFinder introduced a widget for desktop image search.

The founders of Konfabulator, which launched their product on february 10, 2003, have created a pretty darn cute comic strip in 10 chapters about how their company was founded and finally sold to Yahoo.

Corbis Acquires eMotion

Similar to Getty´s efforts with the Media Management Services and the recently in May 2005 launched Digital Asset Management System Media Manager, Corbis today announced that it has acquired eMotion, "a leading provider of hosted solutions for managing and distributing digital media assets and marketing content."
Corbis said "our clients are increasingly seeking ways to manage the still and moving imagery they use in their creative projects ... we are meeting this growing demand with the acquisition of eMotion’s asset management systems, offering one of the industry’s best tools for managing digital assets – whether they be images, footage, or related marketing material." Details here.

What is not mentionend in the press release is that eMotion is also busy in the broadcast industry. According to a recent research project on my desk, eMotion is an active player in the field of Broadcast MAM (Media Asset Management) installations, but still remaining a litte one after other companies like Virage, Convera, Omnibus and BlueOrder and others. eMotion previously owned industry portal FOOTAGE.net.

At least for the mid-sized footage archive owner the worlds of traditional image database vendors (which are adding video features and capabilities to their software), DAM- and  MAM-vendors are merging. New companies like Visono are starting to compete with products like the Media Workbench of industry giant Blueorder. But that´s currently off the topic, another playground and is not to be discussed here. The coming IBC is a better location.

Getty Images: More Bucks, More Eggrolls, Launches Chinese Website

Getty Images has just released the numbers for Q II/2005. Quarterly Highlights:

• Revenue increased 23 percent over the second quarter of 2004
• Operating income grew 39 percent to $55.5 million
• Operating margin of 30 percent
• Reported earnings per diluted share increased to $0.53 from $0.41 in the second quarter of 2004
• Exclusive of accelerated amortization of debt issuance costs of $0.05 per diluted share in the second quarter of 2005, earnings per diluted share increased 41 percent to $0.58 from $0.41
• Digital Vision and Photonica acquisitions completed and integrated

"This quarter is quite possibly the best quarter in our 10-year history," said Jonathan Klein, Getty Images' co-founder and CEO. Klein told Reuters,  "not only did we sell more pictures, we also achieved significant price increases."

Revenue grew 23.3 percent to $185.3 million compared to $150.3 million in the second quarter of 2004. Excluding the effects of changes in currency exchange rates, revenue grew 19.3 percent. Operating income for the second quarter of 2005 grew 39.3 percent to $55.5 million, or 30.0 percent of revenue, compared to $39.8 million, or 26.5 percent of revenue, in the same quarter last year.

Cash and short-term investment balances decreased to $418.8 million at June 30, 2005, from $572.7 million at March 31, 2005. The decrease reflects the cash payments within the quarter of approximately $214 million related to the Digital Vision and Photonica acquisitions. - More details here.

Secondly, in another press release launched shortly later, the company announces the launch of Getty Images China (gettyimages.cn), which will enable Chinese creative professionals to search, download and license imagery from all of Getty Images' collections as well as culturally-relevant local content developed specifically for the Chinese market. All collections and local content will be accessible beginning next month through a Chinese language website, the first of its kind for the market.

"China is currently the fifth largest market in terms of advertising spending, and is poised to surpass Japan", said Jonathan Klein. Getty Images China will license all Getty Images creative stills collections as well as its image partners' collections, including both rights-managed and royalty-free images. As many as 37 collections are now available to communications professionals in China. Getty Images China also includes the assets of a joint venture partner, Unisun Group, Inc. - Details here and here.

In a very good report the Stock Asylum has some details of the conference call with industry analysts ("Getty Expands in China..."):

• The Getty CEO [Klein] made several references to "Image partners that have not been acquired", raising questions about future acquisition plans. Getty Spokesperson Deb Trevino later noted that Getty Images generates cash at the rate of about $200 million a year and "may choose to spend it on acquisitions." She gave no additional details.
• Klein again mentioned the possibilty that Getty Images could start a subscription stock imagery service. Trevino said that an announcement with full details can be expected "in the coming weeks."
• He [Klein] said Getty remains concerned about the lack of protections for intellectual property in China and said this concern is reflected in the size of Getty's Chinese investment. Klein expressed hope that the China will move to better protect intellectual property like copyrighted photographs in the coming years.

Interview With Allen Murabayashi, CEO Of Photoshelter

In the following interview Allen Murabayashi, CEO of Photoshelter, answers to some of the questions about his company, the basic ideas and reasons behind Photoshelter.

Andy: Allen, what was the basic idea to found Photoshelter?

Allen: We live in an increasingly digital world. The proliferation of devices like digital cameras, iPods, and computers in the past few years means that as a society we are accumulating more digital assets. Camera resolutions are going up, and professional photographers are concerned because they realize they can't indefinitely chain hard drives to their computers. At the same time, broadband has become commonplace. So having an online archive is achievable.

Photographers don't have time to learn how to administer their own RAID. They don't have time to swap out drives, or deal with network security. So Photoshelter provides a managed archiving solution that is hassle free, and provides a level of redundancy that no single photographer could match in his/her home.

Secondly, the consolidation of the industry has made it difficult for the individual photographer to compete. I think the famous statistic is that Getty and Corbis do 40% of the stock business with 1% of the photographers. That means there is an enormous amount of talent that is not being represented through picture sales. Providing a marketplace for that to happen is a goal of Photoshelter.

Andy: How do you think PhotoShelter can compete against Digital Railroad and IPNStock?

Allen: First, neither is an archiving solution. Regardless of claims, both systems are designed and priced to sell a limited set of images. And while DRR doesn't currently have an e-commerce solution, we assume that they will develop a commission-based system like everything else out there.

Photoshelter's vision starts a step earlier at the point of the archive. After the images are safe, we're agnostic on how you market/sell your images. We provide an e-commerce solution so that a photographer can manage direct sales to compliment their agency relationship. Or we'll happily feed images into any system, if you choose to sell images elsewhere.

So, in our opinion, we're not competing at the same level. IPNStock appears to be an alternative brand to Getty. DRR appears to offer agency capability to photojournalists. We do not see ourselves as a competitor to agencies. People will use Photoshelter as a springboard for their sales and marketing. In fact, we're talking to a number of agencies about using Photoshelter as their commerce engine.

Also, this "industry" (i.e. the little guy creating their own "agency") is very nascent. DRR, for example, is often quoted as being an industry-changing force, but they only have a couple hundred clients. Printroom, by contrast has over 5,000 clients. So IPN and DRR might end up being major factors in the years to come, but it's impossible to tell at this point. We think it's a very exciting time for photographers and photo buyers. [Click continue to read the rest of the interview]

Media Bakery Chooses VIMA Technologies For Visual Search Feature

Nothing to add. More here.
VIMA´s product, the VIMA MindReader, is a competitor to similar solutions from Idee and LTU, but "unlike technologies that visually match to a single image, VIMA MindReader™ Technology actually learns from each positive and negative selection made during a search. Visual clues, even seemingly contradictory ones (e.g., a red sky and a blue sky), are combined by advanced machine-learning to understand what the searcher has in mind."

[Update: later, but longer and deeper in "VIMA Powers Image Search for Media Bakery" (Publish.com), mentioning also the use at Danita Delimont Stock Photography]

QuickLinks For The Weekend

• Photomuse.org has launched. Photomuse aims to create a freely accessible database of photographs from some of the world’s greatest photographers. It´s a collaboration between the George Eastman House and the International Center of Photography. (NYT)
• Blogging with Lotus Notes: IBM alphaWorks unproudly presents new blogging tools.
• Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. is on target to deliver an average return of $1 million per year. Currently the network makes $2,335 a day in Adsense revenue: "A million bucks [per year] without a sales person!" But: "Now, before you get too excited let me tell you we’ve got 103 bloggers on the payroll and nine staffers here at Weblogs, Inc.".
• Blogging with Aliens, weird? MindComet launches BloginSpace.com, a website sending bloggers where no blog has gone before: deep space. BloginSpace.com is a free service for bloggers allowing them to submit their blog feeds for transmission into deep space. The site will aggregate blog content into transmission packages and send the content into deep space via a powerful earth-based satellite broadcast.
• Dan Heller looks at an old question "Does RF pricing affect RM images?"
• Kodak struggling to cope with digital revolution: Picture-taking pioneer to cut 10,000 more jobs than previously reported (MSNBC)
• Yahoo has updated the Royalty Free category in the Stock Photography listing. Some of the companies or websites mentioned here ("Free High Quality Stock Photography") are now peacefully next to each other with serious brands like Brand X Pictures and others.
• And completely off the topic: just discovered PostSecret,  an "ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard" that gets published on the weblog. Check it out.

Leave Your Wife, Sign Up For OpenRAW

Something I totally forgot to mention here is OpenRAW. Leave your wife, get rid of your kids, but don´t forget to sign up for OpenRAW if you care about the future of your digital image files. Remember: if you bought a Canon EOS D30 for a lot of bucks in the year 2000, you won´t be able to open your old files with the actual version of Canon´s professional DPP software 1.6.1.

OpenRAW is not a company, it´s a very fresh movement like OpenSource or the Wikipedia:

This site was created to give photographers and everybody interested in an open documentation of proprietary RAW formats a place to voice their opinion and to encourage camera makers to openly document their proprietary RAW formats.
In the short history of digital photography, manufacturers have released numerous cameras with constantly evolving RAW formats. This has lead to the existence of a vast number of RAW "dialects," even within each major brand, that store image and camera setting data in a different manner.
In some cases manufacturers have even encrypted the data within newer RAW files. Intentionally or not this encryption has placed full access to the images stored in these files out of reach of the photographers that took them. Unless, of course, they limit themselves to tools sold by the camera manufacturer.
To date, this vast number of RAW formats has been hidden by the transparent support offered in RAW converter software, provided by both the camera manufacturer and various third parties. At the time of writing, the open source dcraw converter currently supports no less than 163 formats. However, as manufacturers lose interest in their discontinued products, and drop support for them, the true impact of all of these "dialects" will be felt.
Photographers will find their older images inaccessible, as future software versions lose support for older cameras. In the worst cases, entire brands may disappear, as has already happened with Contax.

Shortly, these problems include:

• Limiting processing choices and creative freedom
• Reducing choices for software that matches workflow needs
• Increased probability that as time passes a RAW file will be unreadable or cannot be used to reproduce the photographer's original interpretation
• Increased costs and slowed development of image processing software

The OpenRAW solution wants camera manufacturers to publicly document their RAW image formats -- past, present, and future -- and the adoption of a universal RAW format.

On the recently launched website of OpenRAW, Michael Reichmann (of The Luminous Landscape) and Juergen Specht published an article called "The RAW Flaw" (May 2005) highlighting some of the existing problems and concerns.

Aimed at Longhorn, here is "OpenRAW's response to RAW support in next version of Microsoft Windows".

For those new to the techniques and problems OpenRAW has set up a very informative FAQ-resource.

Regarding Adobe´s new DNG format, the publicly available file format designed and documented by Adobe Systems for the long term archiving of the RAW files produced by digital cameras also promoted to camera manufacturers for use as an in camera RAW format (see also "Getty, Corbis, National Geographic, ASMP, ASPP... Everyone Loves Adobe´s New .DNG Format"), OpenRAW states:

Currently the Adobe DNG format does not meet the goal of OpenRAW. At this time (May 18th, 2005) no available cameras write DNG format files. To use DNG files, existing RAW formats need to be converted. Unfortunately, since most current RAW formats are not fully documented, the conversion from RAW to DNG is still based on reverse engineering of undocumented metadata (tags). Therefore it is possible to misinterpret or lose critical information. Billions of existing RAW images have already been archived. Only open documentation of past and existing RAW formats can ensure full utilization of these archived RAW files.

DNG also allows "private data" to be stored in the DNG file. This private data is only known to the camera company that wrote the private data. Third party software that reads and/or writes DNG files will ignore private data recorded by the camera. Only the software written by the camera maker will read the private data written to the DNG file by its camera. Some of this private data might be important or useful information needed by a RAW converter. Adobe's DNG format does not eliminate the problem of undocumented RAW files but transfers the problem into another "container", the DNG file. By allowing private (undocumented) data in the DNG file, DNG does not meet OpenRAW's goals.

OpenRAW encourages you to "Act now!": sign up the Open Letter of OpenRAW and send it to the camera maker of your choice, or each of them listed.

Currently over 1,000 individuals are supporting OpenRAW and some photo related web sites and companies.

PS. Personally I´ve stepped back to film. From the image processing lab, I get prints, an overview print, a CD with all the files and -- negatives/slides. The problem is that it has become hard to find a lab capable of processing B/W-films. But that´s another story.

Here´s a related and very good blog enry to some concerns of Joerg Colberg/Conscientious that created quite an upset for a lot of people: "Thoughts about digital photography". Later Joerg points to another post of Bruce Barnbaum, "Thoughts on digital photography".

Also related:

• The Intentionality is gone: The Tidal Shift away from Photographing Memories [Digital Cameras, Photography and The Implications Part I]
• "The digital revolution is creating a gaping hole in our heritage" [Digital Cameras, Photography and The Implications Part II]