Fotolia´s image pool loses 40% of its images

With the introduction of what Fotolia called the new Version 2, many readers were surprised to note that the numbers of images overall fell down from 3.2 million images to 1.9 million images.

Where have they gone overnight? Responding to a specific request, here´s how Fotolia explains the loss of 40% of their image pool:

 

"With the launch of v2 we started a new routine erasing all images that have not been sold for the last 18 months.

With the vast amount of images on Fotolia we felt that it is important to kick out the unsellable images thus slimming down the database, in order to guarantee an improved search experience for our customers.

We feel that this is the right step considering a microstock market that starts to mature.

Sheer amount of images might be interesting to some of your competitors but a thorough analysis resulted into this decision for quality instead of quantity.

 

Clearly, if 40% of the images never got downloaded and sold within 18 months, then those images were definitely not of a superior photographic quality.

Despite the possibility that those image were never found because of insufficient keywording, this means also in general that the internal company department responsible for selecting qualifying images after the upload through the photographer was working with an error ratio of 40%; that´s in general every two and a halfth image.

More specific: that possibly too many images were accepted when the company started (error ratio possibly far over 40%), and that the following times with tougher image acceptance rules with an error ratio far under 40% could not significantly change the overall in general error ratio to less than 10%.

About twenty people asscociated with the Fotolia team are responsible for the image selection process.

Fotolia explains that they altered the guidelines for image selection two times, in summer 2006 after the first million of images and again in January 2007, in order to ensure that only images of superior photographic quality are eligible.

 

With Version 2 Fotolia introduced also the small standard RF License and a pricing update.

All details on this here and here.

 

Related:

• Fotolia tranfers 1.3 million images to swiss secure deposit box, FBI puts executives on Most Wanted list (Daryl Lang/PDN; June 18, 2007)

 

Comments

[Joseph]

I am sorry but you are all wrong. Fotolia did not erased any picture (yet). The cleaning opperation you are refering too (18 months with no download) has not be implemented yet.

Just the figure on the welcome page of Fotolia is the number of uploads, even if the upload is unsucessful, even if the image is not submitted or not accepted it has a ID number and increase the overal figure.

With version 2 I guess they did not move the picture which were not indexed.

Version 2 is faster than Version 1, therefore it might improve visibility of most pictures.