Shoot for Stock

As more and more photographers ‘Shoot for Stock’ alongside their regular portrait and commercial work, Howard Butterfield of theimagefile... offers advice on these extra channels of income.

Q...What would you say is a typical user of your site?

We have three main users of theimagefile.com website.

Our members – Professional and semi professional photographers who use our web application to present their work (which includes stock imagery) to the web in a variety of ways.

The photographers’ customers – buyers of the images that the photographers have loaded. This is nearly always achieved transparently from the photographers own website. Their customers are generally unaware we are involved.

Image buyers – publishing houses and advertising agencies for example searching for and purchasing images for a wide variety of uses.

However the buyers for images are getting more and more diverse members of the general public for example wishing to use an image as a piece of art or to even supplement holiday pictures!

We don’t keep this information secret though, each search run for images by potential purchasers is entered into a database along with the results and made available for our members to view.

Q... How many images are submitted to your site every day?

Our membership currently adds between 10,000 and 20,000 images a day, though we often see that rate go much higher over the weekends. The majority of those images are destined for events galleries but the stock library is growing very well. We currently have nearly 3.5 million images online. For each of those images we create and watermark 7 thumbnails. Our members and customers rely on the constant availability of those images, so the IT infrastructure has to be very robust and is often the source of our major challenges!

Q... How much does it cost to submit?

We do not have submission fees, image creators simply have to be members of theimagefile.... Membership rates depend on what options the photographers choose from the system and whether they are members of affiliate organisations who receive discounts but if members are primarily interested in the stock element membership only costs five pounds per month. That gives them the ability to run a stock library from their own website with unlimited images and inclusion of those images into theimagefile stock library. Commission on stock sales is only 25%.

Q...What images or subjects are prohibited for submission?

That is a huge question… There are books written on the subject that fail to fully cover the issue and we and our members have to be very careful about the images loaded for sale as stock.

However some guiding principles are:

The provenance of an image has to be very clear. For example, though theimagefile don’t sell exclusive licences some libraries do. Once those images are sold then they clearly must not be sold anywhere else for the period of that licence and of course the member loading the image for sale should indeed own it!

Releases and permissions are required in an ever growing number of situations. Models and buildings are obvious examples as are images taken from National Trust Property or pictures of children in certain circumstances.

Submissions containing pictures of other works of art or Corporate Logos need also to be treated with great care.

We also have a policy on images that are likely to be overly offensive. Nudity as art is of course fine. However, it is always a fine line where this becomes pornography which is unacceptable. (There are private upload areas for secure online management and confidential delivery for ‘glamour’ work) There have also been examples of members trying to load overly gory or gruesome work for example. Though there is no law against it, it is generally in bad taste and we would not display those types of images.

All these rules though very often take second place to common sense and though we do have occasion to quarantine images, generally the membership and photographers as a whole are a very responsible group and sensitive to these types of issues. It is far more likely that a member calls and asks for our opinion before loading.

We also require one mugshot of the interviewee. The company logo. A hundred words on the company – where it began, where you are now etc.

Q...What do you see as the future of stock photography?

Again that is another monster question. The world is becoming awash with imagery from the millions and millions of digital cameras and telephones in use. We are often now seeing telephone images in newspapers and ‘footage’ broadcast on TV. The challenge is to get the right images, at the right quality, easily and affordably available. This can be done and istock are a great example. All this exposure to photography is making everyone far more image aware and appreciative of quality images. I think the future is very bright for stock imagery of all kinds.

History

theimagefile... coding was specified and commissioned to a team of ex Microsoft coders based in Seattle in 2002. The system was two years in coding before the pre launch beta version of the web-application was made available to a hand picked user base of 100 in 2004. Inevitable improvements driven by user feedback led to the final ‘Version 1’ being launched in January 2005 at Focus.’ Version 2’ followed in January 2006 and ‘Version 3’ launched in 2007. theimagefile... now has well over 1000 member customers in the UK and is a refined and polished product. The website regularly gets more than a million hits a day and we are currently storing nearly 3.5 million online high resolution images for sale on behalf of our customers.

theimagefile... now also has servers in Ireland and is planning further international growth this year into the rest of the English speaking world. This expansion will bring a rich cultural and geographic diversity to the image library and attract image buyers from all over the world.