Pat: How does StockPhotoFinder work?

Randy: http://www.StockPhotoFinder.com is a search engine. Its goal is to search all the qualified business-to-business stock photography sources that are out there. We want to be the Google of stock photography. Google is a great resource for finding images on the web, but the problem is the vast majority of the images are not qualified for licensing as stock photography. You lose time trying to track down rights for the images. We have come up with a very fast, very easy way of searching pictures across multiple web sites in the industry, and at the same time limit them to only image collections that know how to make them available for professional licensing.
Pat: What about museum collections?
Randy: We will expand into those areas, and to any imagery that can be used for editorial or commercial purposes. That would include archives like the Library of Congress. Initially we are starting in the stock photography industry because it is where the core need and the core material is.

Pat: You have stringent e-commerce requirements?

Randy: Yes, the image collection has to be from a company that is available to license on demand. For photographers it might be difficult because they travel, and may not be able to answer the phone to deal with a stock photo request. Nine-to-five sales support is necessary. Libraries have people who answer the phone, so they meet our stringent requirements. What we don’t want to see is an answering machine and a late response.

Pat: How many collections do you have?

Randy: We launched eight months ago, and have over fifty collections; we are into the millions of pictures. There are two sides to the equation, as we have the public site and we have sites that we are aggregating for specific publishing clients. In the first instance, the image provider pays a marketing fee to be searched. They pay a low fee to have us spider their site, search their images and display them for all to see in a public site. The second alternative is a publisher or an advertising agency, which can elect to choose which stock collections they want to search. In this case the image supplier pays nothing, and the image user pays for the service. We aggregate exactly the stock photo agents and photographers that they request. For example, an editorial textbook company may have a number of photo agencies with which they have a special price advantage. We then aggregate the images from those agencies only. In that role, we are primarily a technology provider. It’s a closed site, password protected under the brand of that publisher, and all we are doing is aggregating the search. It allows only their researchers to go into the site.

Pat: How is your business different from competitors, such as portals?

Randy: The technology is definitely different. Since we work on a spidering process, we don’t do any live searching. That means there is no load on the servers of the image providers. There is also no physical submission of images, and the images reside on the servers of the image providers. Portals act as an agent and there is a percentage that they take for the sale. We take no percentage of the sale. We drive traffic to the image seller, and then it’s between the image buyer and the image seller to make the transaction. In other words, we do not have a competitor. Our system is unique.

Pat: What is StockPipeline?

Randy: Another company of ours is about ready to launch a new service called http://www.StockPipeline.com, which will be live by late August. It will be a hosting solution primarily for photographers. StockPipeline is designed to be a fully e-commerce software application where photographers can directly upload their high-res images. The images are automatically turned into deliverables, previews and thumbnails. There is a keywording process that can be extracted from the IPTC header. Photographers can control the price list and set their own pricing. They can also do their own billing, or they can use the e-commerce process to transact with credit cards through a centralized account. It is a photographer-direct process, and we created this business model in order to have another hosting alternative for people who want to go into StockPhotoFinder.
StockPipeline.com has as part of its fulfillment process a method of delivery that allows the client to resize the image on the fly upon download. It’s a fractil-based program that has minimal loss of quality. You can take a file size shot digitally at 20MB and blow it up to 500 MB, then compress it down as a JPEG (at a ratio of 100 to 1) and have it be publishable with almost no loss. When resizing on the fly, the client can determine if he/she wants a TIFF or a JPEG, and determine the dpi, the size of the image and whether it should be in color or black and white. This creates an interesting change for the industry. For those business models that price by size, size is no longer a relevant factor because we can take a small file size and make it huge. It won’t be long before others have that technology as well.

Pat: What do you see for future trends in the industry? It seems you are bringing the future to us now.

Randy: There is a need for everybody to have effective marketing and to get images into distribution. The age of clients finding the small individual source is waning. Creators and small agencies are going to have to figure out how to band together into ever-larger collectives and distribute. The trend clearly is towards mass marketing and large entities distributing images.
Footage is also the future. We are implementing the process for footage. It’s just a matter of time before we will have available footage for a search. The process has a common lightbox and all the same functionality as still imagery. It will be here by the end of the year. We are already searching millions of pictures. We expect to be searching 10’s of millions of pictures and footage clips.
Keywording is going to become less effective in finding images. We are going to implement other forms of searching. Clients can now search with keywords, find a photograph that is close to what they want, click on the similars button, and that image will find similar images from all the various web sites. We will have a range of keyword and visual and concept searches to find similars. The technology for this industry is changing fast and those who stay one step ahead will be the final players in the game. Pat Hunt, MacTribe