Nearly five years (here´s a bit of the history) after similar services for the single professional photographer had popped up in Europe -- except for exactlyphoto from SF --, a chorus of approval, praise and cheers is raising in the US as new companies with the same services are entering the national market.
After IPNStock and Digital Railroad -- just to name two companies; see more in "Paradigm Shifts In Stock Photography" -- another new player in this field is Photoshelter, online since June 22, 2005.
Founded in 2005, it offers an online archival storage solution and aims to the full-time independent professional photographer. The company´s services do not "require long commitments, start-up costs, and high monthly fees. Photoshelter only charges you for space, not bandwidth. There are no start-up fees, or hidden costs".
This is the team behind CEO Allen Murabayashi with some having a common history at HotJobs.com (later sold to Yahoo).
The people with a background as photographers are Jason Burfield and
Grover Sanschagrin, both formerly working for/on SportsShooter.com, and Allen Murabayashi as freelance photojournalist.
The company offers an e-commerce solution ("allowing your clients to pay you via credit card makes it quicker and
easier
for clients to give you money. Photoshelter doesn't collect a
commmission from your sales. Receive payments directly via credit card"), but I haven´t been able to test this feature in-depth. The site offers also the feature to search over all photographers and makes no specific distinction between editorial and stock photographers. Currently there is no RSS feature available, the mighty and yet underestimated tool Digital Railroad is offering to its clients.
Next,
Photoshelter offers the possibility to search only for special images of a photographers´s entire collection and to assign prices to them. For photo agencies, Photoshelter created a tool they call
Photoshelter's Virtual Agency™; it "allows a group of photographers to form
their own 'agency' by linking their collective Photoshelter archives. They can market themselves together through a shared public webpage
that also includes the ability to showcase galleries and provide image
searching". As said before, I haven´t been able to test this live and in reality, but if the promises are true it seems to be a very intriguing and cool feature.
Besides the normal lightbox feature, another unique (afaik) feature is the possibility of selling prints of your images, a service Photoshelters offers together with EZPrints.
Photoshelter offers a 7-day-trial. The price list ranges from a 10 GB Storage at $5.99/month up to 1 TB at currently $400/month (if this is a managed service, the price is very cheap*). Photoshelter charges "a flat rate of $1 per sales transaction regardless of" the image price. Compare this to the price list of IPNStock: one time set up fee of $595, monthly hosting fee of $195.
Currently
Photoshelter "supports over 400 image formats,
including RAW formats from most of the major camera manufacturers."
Single files uploaded have no limit regarding the file size. They say they have tested file sizes up to 300 MB.
For the list of current photographers using the site read the Photographer's Directory. The list of
Photoshelter's Virtual Agency™ covers SportShooters VA, Bridgewaters Sports and GO.
Furthermore, Photoshelter publishes a blog named "A Picture's Worth"; the recent entry looks at the "Total Cost of Ownership". Tested quickly with Bloglines, the blog however has not one single subscriber -- the blog is five days old.
The current company´s website shows no real address, just a standard email contact formular. The website says that Photoshelter is a product of Bitshelter, LLC, but the URL points back to Photoshelter.
So what do we learn? In former times, when a company in a new business field got funded, other VCs used to form raider teams with more money, hopefully more bright people etc., just to snap another piece of the cake. However, I don´t know if this is the case here. Anyway: set up a test account with Photoshelter and similiar services and see who exactly fits your needs.
Or coming back to the beginning of this entry and re-echoing the topic of this years´CEPIC: "Does the past have a future?": YES.
[*Update: Photoshelter´s service is hosted in the S2F's SF datacenter; the site states that S2F is also hosting VII Photo Agency, a company that is a client of Digital Railroad. - See the pricelist at the bottom of the S2F homepage.
There´s a long separate thread on Lightstalkers trying to compare PhotoShelter and Digital Railroad.
In another thread, Evan Nisselson of DRR has extended today his discount offer to the members of Lightstalkers.]
[2nd Update] In an email Grover Sanschagrin of Photoshelter likes to point out that ... [Click continue]
"Photoshelter is a product of Bitshelter, LLC, located in New York City. Our main datacenter is located on the US East Coast, and is fully managed by the Bitshelter staff. Our secondary datacenter is housed on the West Coast, through an arrangement with S2F Online, Inc. However, although S2F Online provides the power, bandwidth and space for the West Coast portion of the Bitshelter/Photoshelter network, all of the management responsibilities are with Bitshelter.
Photoshelter's strength as a safe and affordable online archiving system is made possible through our locally and geographically redundant network of storage devices. ("Locally", meaning RAID. "Geographically", meaning multiple mirrored data centers on opposite sides of the USA.)
We are committed to providing services to the independent photographer, and the Photoshelter product you see today is just the beginning."
