Fotolia, a marketplace for microstock photography and video, is launching PhotoXpress, a free, premier-quality image bank, which will offer users royalty free image licenses for personal or professional use, ranging from Web site design to advertisements and editorial imagery.
Patrick Lor, president of PhotoXpress North America, says the site will feature a collection of more than 350,000 images and illustrations, but Lor’s ambitions are to have close to a million photos available free of charge. Lor, who also holds the title of president of Fotolia North America, recently joined the company. Lor previously helped to build rival and now Getty-owned iStockPhoto, which he helped co-found (Lor left in 2006, shortly after Getty acquired the startup for $50 million).
Lor says PhotoXpress will remain independent from sister site Fotolia, however the two are intricately connected. PhotoXpress members will be able to license up to 10 images daily, free of cost. The images are sourced from stock illustrators and photographers from around the world and span more than 22 categories, including global landscape scenery, photos of people in professional settings, architecture, and generic backgrounds. Only proper attribution is required. Professional ad agencies and firms who might need more than 10 images a day will be sent to Fotolia. In this sense, PhotoXpress is a lead generator for Fotolia. But more than that, it is a way for professional photographers to expose some of their work for free to a larger Web audience, while inculcating a respect for copyrights among Web consumers. It is an attempt to bridge the two worlds, and Fotolia wanted to do this before its competitors did.
Lom says the biggest challenge is convincing the photography world to give away stock photography for free. PhotoXpress is still working out if the site will make any revenue—the obvious revenue stream is third-party advertising on the site, but Lor couldn’t confirm or deny that there will be ads on the site. PhotoXpress’s main competitor is Hungarian site Stock.xchange, which happens to be partly owned by Getty Images. Currently, Stock.xchange has close to 400,000 images to choose from.
At TechCrunch, we often uses Flickr images licensed under Creative Commons for the best choice of images and the ability to publish the images freely. Bloggers will definitely find it helpful to tap into the wide selection of PhotoXpress’s site to find royalty free, high quality images to illustrate posts. This is exactly the right model. Image use is free up to a certain level (i.e., for most consumers, who serve to spread the images around and market them in effect). If you need more, then you start to pay a reasonable, modest amount.
(Photo courtesy PhotoXpress).
Congrats Pat! This looks fantastic.
makes sense for small web designing companies and bloggers who want to use their images.
I guess a new perspective would be to allow third party /independent photographers who would like to sell their pics.
PhotoXpress can take a cut and let it user base grow
This one image, for free, makes it all worth while:
http://www.phot...-beauty/1410465
or even NSFW: http://www.phot...e-faith/1722829
very artistic!
To be honest, it looks like they’re seperating the wheat from the chaff…
Fotolia doesn’t appears to have the quality guidelines that iStock does and it appears in their offered work.
Fotolia is probably going to use this as a way to weed out the crap in their galleries… and there’s a lot of it.
do you think I should sell some of my pizza review photos from http://www.worstpizza.com to other sites looking to use pizza photos?
I think you should continue being a complete and total jackass. It’s your personal brand.
It’s really hard to believe that after all these years there are some people who still think that a profitable internet business model starts with making your product free.
All this does is drive another nail in the coffin of stock photography. As it is, since the invasions of Photodisc, Getty and iStock, it’s almost impossible to make a living shooting stock.
The upside is that once “businessmen,” like Pat, kill stock photography altogether and put the all those photographers out of business, it will all be free all the time. It will all be crap and it’ll be the same crap every year… but it will all be free.
And that’s what’s important.
Rick, a part of life is that innovation changes market dynamics. Everything must come to an end.
It’s why the music industry is “dying.” And it’s why stock as an industry is dying too. That’s not Pat’s fault.
There is no use complaining about it. If Pat hadn’t done it, someone else would have. Pat was just one of the first to be disruptive and innovate. And that makes him a good businessman, not a bad one.
No, Avi. Pat is a bad businessman because his business will fail. The thing that seems to be beyond Pat, and also evaded Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein and Steve Davis, and David Norris, is that if your business is destroying the industry that it lives on, the future of your business is limited.
See, Pat is not innovating anything. Pat is repeating a business model that has failed again and again. I’m not “blaming” Pat. I’m saying that Pat is a short sighted, destructive idiot.
Which is technically not “complaining” but criticizing.
Rick,
I agree with you that they’re diluting the quality and emphasis on good work. However, if you look at the images they’re giving away for free… they’re the bottom of the barrel quality wise.
The market will always need high quality photography… as in good art, not good pictures.
This is great. There’re lots of great free pictures on the net, but very few you can actually use. Thanks TC/Leena, I just signed up. BTW I already use Fotolia and love it.
One question: what does “Only proper attribution is required ” mean? I couldn’t find anything on this on their FAQ. I mean, if you use a pic on your web page, where do you attribute?
The sad thing is, the paid stock photo industry is pretty much dying, as even larger companies don’t have the budget for this anymore.
Sekhar, it appears the attribution is for Photoexpress only. I’m surprised there is no attribution for the photographer.
“when using images downloaded from this site, you are required to credit PhotoXpress in the following manner:
Photo: copyright PhotoXpress.com, or
Photo courtesy PhotoXpress.com, or
© PhotoXpress.com”
http://www.phot...ss.com/Info/FAQ
If you are using images in a website, I think you should embed that credit line in the HTML as a comment, rather than having it visible on the page.
Since they don’t specify where the credits should appear, I’d start there, and then, if they object, make it visible on the page later.
Yeah, I saw that, as well as the agreement (http://www.phot.../Info/RFLicense) that has more on this:
“[Do not] use the Work in an editorial manner, without the following credit adjacent to the Image: “© [Photographer's name] / [Name of the agency providing the Image]”
But my point was, where do actually write this attribution? Bob has an answer, but it’ll be great to get more specifics. May be I’ll ask them for clarification.
OK, PhotoXpress just responded (that was fast):
“The copyright information needs to be added to the image, or you can add it next to it on the website. It has to be visible.”
Bummer in a way, but I can understand. After all, the contributors are doing it in large part for recognition.
Big fan of Fotolia and glad to hear of them making these strides. I’m not sure what people mean when saying there is no business model. They do charge. Quality of video and images I’ve perused are great. Good call on showcasing the fish in the fishbowl clip.
For those users (journalists, bloggers or advertisers or advernalistoggers…) who are prolific users of online imagery, this is a great value-add.
Kudos, guys. Glad that you also have so many various APIs.
The biggest problem with a lot of these sites including this one is they are clunky to use. First off USE DATA portability. It is lazy website design which is like giving the finger to users. We don’t give a dam about what would make it easy for you.
Second I hate how too many of these companies make you download one photo at a time. I want to select say 20 and then download in batch. I want to be able to title the photos as I create a batch and tag them for quick reference. I also want to be able to select where I download them to. And even send to picassa, or my fb page. If you are going to do something like this do it right and quick doing a half ass job.
As a designer, I got pretty excited when I saw this story because I love seeing resources for free vectors, but after browsing though all their vector files… the majority of them are terrible. There are much better sites out there for free vector graphics like http://www.Vecteezy.com that seem to have much higher quality stuff plus they don’t require you to sign up to download.
It ridiculous that anyone should pay for advertising on the Photo Express website. Why do they want revenue, it should all be free? Why does Patrick Lor expect ad revenue? He feels photographers should work for free why shouldn’t he and Photo Express?
There are still some restrictions with this site that make it hard to use. I prefer Freerangestock – http://www.freerangestock.com – which offers thousands of free images, does NOT require attribution/credit, and allows photographers to benfit from the ad revenue their uploaded images generate.
Hey, that sounds like a better model (for everyone). Thanks for the pointer, will check it out.
yes the terms and conditions and the RF download agreements don’t exactly make easy reading! – in fact worse – unless your read the FAQ page there is no mention of a need to attribute the images, it’s not in the terms you accept before download/signup they only a mention that editorial use must be credited (which is fairly standard)
Best of luck to those folks. There will certainly be demand from users, so if they can figure out the revenue side of the equation, they should be off to the races.
I don’t really see why photographers would do this “for recognition” when the attribution has to be to PhotoXpress, not the individual photographer. Frankly, I don’t see any benefit to the photographer at all and I would not put any of my images there.
And the PhotoXpress tag line, “Tired of paying for images?” is utterly insulting to photographers. If a photographer creates an image that someone else finds useful, does the photographer not deserve payment, even if only the type of micropayment that iStockPhoto pays?
Fotalia has an office on the Avenue des Champs Elysées!
A very expensive location for a web based service.
Seems they started out with money in their pockets to afford such spendings.