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Author Topic: Anyone using Photoshelter to sell photos?  (Read 8579 times)

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« on: November 26, 2013, 15:42 »
+1
I was wondering if anyone is using Photoshelter to sell stock photos, particularly Rights-Managed, and what is your experience?
Thanks in advance!
Elena.


« Reply #1 on: November 26, 2013, 16:08 »
+3
We've closed our Photoshelter sites. Their Google presence is poor, and the internal search is overloaded with news and event photography. It's not a good place for general stock.

For RM, the Photoquote engine is just too optimistic about prices. We've put our efforts into our Symbiostock site and linked the RM out to Alamy for now. The returns are certainly better for RF.

« Reply #2 on: November 26, 2013, 16:35 »
+1
We've closed our Photoshelter sites. Their Google presence is poor, and the internal search is overloaded with news and event photography. It's not a good place for general stock.

For RM, the Photoquote engine is just too optimistic about prices. We've put our efforts into our Symbiostock site and linked the RM out to Alamy for now. The returns are certainly better for RF.

Thank you Travelling-light for thorough and helpful response! By the way, your Symbiostock site is very nice, and your New Zealand images just make me want to jump on the plane and go there tomorrow:)

« Reply #3 on: November 26, 2013, 21:22 »
+3
I haven't sold a lot via my Photoshelter site but I have gotten some nice RM sales. Nearly all of those searching went to Photoshelter and did a global search.

Although I have many photos set for immediate sale and download, that has never happened. Magazines, galleries and museums have each contacted me to negotiate a price (sometimes higher than what I had it set for) and I provided them with a lightbox and direct download after payment via paypal or check. I get a handful of these each year but do very little marketing of my site. Not sure how it would work for someone who is actively marketing their work there. It is set up so you can easily put in both RM and RF licensing info as well as sell prints. You can do packages as well as individual sales.

I've had individuals contact me about buying prints there too via facebook links and via google searches - but again they emailed me and I had the work printed through my lab where they were local (they couldn't work out the PS interface) - and sent others to FAA when they wanted framed prints. 

I spoke with a photo consultant recently via a short industry-sponsored portfolio review and it seems many people in the industry see Photoshelter as having a good website structure for selling stock so a lot of art directors and photo editors go there to search for specific things (maybe when they don't find them elsewhere?). I get clients through the site too and have much of my work backed up there so I'm happy with it ( i have over 1TB of offsite storage there. I keep meaning to market my stock photos there more but the handful of RM and other sales I get there more than cover my yearly pro membership, which isn't cheap, but you can change around and design the site yourself with very little coding needed.

If you are interested you can save up to $50 on a yearly membership with this link http://www.photoshelter.com/referral/MA2CA7TC7J


PaulieWalnuts

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« Reply #4 on: November 26, 2013, 22:18 »
+2
I've been with them a few years. I use them mostly for prints at the moment because I'm GI/IS exclusive so I don't have much to say about the stock functionality.

They can do RF, RM and personal licensing. RM is a calculator much like Alamy and other RM sites. The standard RM pricing seems a bit high but you can adjust it.

Photoshelter's SEO isn't highly optimized but you can get good results. Photoshelter doesn't do marketing to buyers so it's up to you to drive traffic.

The backend is pretty mature and the front end is highly customizable if you get the right plan.

Some of the stuff I don't like...

I think the new Beam isn't all that great. Not user friendly, confusing and too many clicks.

They are very slow to fix problems and add new features.

They take a percentage of sales in addition to the monthly fee.

I would strongly suggest evaluating Photodeck. They recently completely redesigned their system and the results are pretty impressive. 

« Reply #5 on: November 27, 2013, 03:23 »
+2
Wanted to give it a try for a year. 2 months to go. No sales and poor presence on the net. think I''ll kill the effort. Waste of money

« Reply #6 on: December 02, 2013, 14:48 »
+3
Wow I didn't realize they take percentage of sales on top of the hosting fee! This seems like a reap-off considering they don't do any advertising to drive traffic to the images. I think I'll pass for now. Might as well host my RM collection on my own site.

« Reply #7 on: December 02, 2013, 17:41 »
+1
Photodeck does not take any percentage from your sales.

« Reply #8 on: December 03, 2013, 09:32 »
+1
I'll chime in here as I had a photoshelter account for about three years for both my wedding and portrait business and stock business.  Worked ok for selling prints, and it was a great easily indexed backup tool.

But (and a big but) you really really have to push your own site on to buyers.  For some reason their google indexing is an absolute shambles and your images didn't show up in google images, and your galleries wouldn't show up in google searches.  Surely that's one of the benefits of having your own site?

There were numerous posts about it on their forums with zero resolution.  They recently released newer versions of their templates, and I really did take the time to look into their and try and create a new site.  They certainly look the part, but the functionality just wasn't there for me.  Poorly thought out navigation, that wasn't customisable enough to bend it to your will, yet "template" enough that your site would look like every other photoshelter site (bar the images).

It may work for a dedicated stock sales site, but you'll get no traction whatsoever in google, without marketing yourself heavily, all the while paying for the privilege.  I didn't get anywhere near making back my membership fee investment over the last three years in print (from wedding and portrait) or stock sales.

If you're going to be paying a fee for a site, be sure that you've got the audience waiting to buy your images.  It's not an easy "flick a switch" and all your images will be front and centre.

I will give them credit for the FTP system though (slightly off topic)  I could use that to upload stock images to Photoshelter in the first instance, keyword, meta tag etc there, then farm out all my images to the micros.  That did work well, but wasn't really worth the entrance fee.  Especially when picworkflow does pretty much the same job, and only charges you a cent per upload, you're not tied into that at all.

PaulieWalnuts

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« Reply #9 on: December 03, 2013, 13:18 »
+2
I'll chime in here as I had a photoshelter account for about three years for both my wedding and portrait business and stock business.  Worked ok for selling prints, and it was a great easily indexed backup tool.

But (and a big but) you really really have to push your own site on to buyers.  For some reason their google indexing is an absolute shambles and your images didn't show up in google images, and your galleries wouldn't show up in google searches.  Surely that's one of the benefits of having your own site?

There were numerous posts about it on their forums with zero resolution.  They recently released newer versions of their templates, and I really did take the time to look into their and try and create a new site.  They certainly look the part, but the functionality just wasn't there for me.  Poorly thought out navigation, that wasn't customisable enough to bend it to your will, yet "template" enough that your site would look like every other photoshelter site (bar the images).

It may work for a dedicated stock sales site, but you'll get no traction whatsoever in google, without marketing yourself heavily, all the while paying for the privilege.  I didn't get anywhere near making back my membership fee investment over the last three years in print (from wedding and portrait) or stock sales.

If you're going to be paying a fee for a site, be sure that you've got the audience waiting to buy your images.  It's not an easy "flick a switch" and all your images will be front and centre.

I will give them credit for the FTP system though (slightly off topic)  I could use that to upload stock images to Photoshelter in the first instance, keyword, meta tag etc there, then farm out all my images to the micros.  That did work well, but wasn't really worth the entrance fee.  Especially when picworkflow does pretty much the same job, and only charges you a cent per upload, you're not tied into that at all.

My experience has been a bit different. All of my pages and images are indexed by Google and Google Images and I have good search results for my target search terms.  But, it has taken a lot of SEO work to get good results - sitemap submission, keyword analysis and planning, optimizing content, results tracking, making adjustments, etc.  I'm using a Graph Paper Press Wordpress template with mine and Google loves Wordpress. Plus it's CSS/PHP so I can change whatever I want. The Photoshelter platform has SEO configuration but I wouldn't call it overly optimized which is why getting good results with Google can be difficult. If the Photoshelter sitemap isn't automatically recognized by Google Webmaster Tools your site probably wont get indexed well or at all until the problem is corrected.

Photoshelter has a lot of quirks. Like you said, they tend to ignore problems they're unwilling or unable to fix which is frustrating. If you're willing to accept and work around the quirks it's a good platform. Any personal website requires a lot of work. Unless you have some rare images that are in high demand, it takes lot of effort to draw traffic and get sales. Symbiostock seems like a good Wordpress platform but I don't see anybody here saying sales are pouring in so I think getting traffic and sales is a problem no matter what platform you use. 

I did a lot of research and Photoshelter and Photodeck seem to have the most complete systems for people who want to do all types of licensing like RM, RF, Personal, and prints. I'd suggest evaluating them both. The new Photodeck system is really slick.

« Reply #10 on: December 04, 2013, 05:34 »
0
Yeah, I'd agree actually Paulie.

I had a Wordpress Graph Paper press site that was indeed indexed really well (mainly because it was wordpress! :))

However, the actual Photoshelter site was the part that was poorly indexed in my experience, and I read up on the sitemaps etc, but they seemed unwilling to look into or fix the issues.  I found it especially frustrating that they seemed to value new custom over current custom, with the launch of their new template sites etc, and wouldn't address outstanding issues dating back at least two years.  I'll admit I didn't look too carefully into the Sitemaps.  But naming images very very specifically still didn't result in image buying pages coming up at the top of google.

I took the time to go up to a monument near where I live (not widely photographed) and take some nice images of it at sunrise.  I keyworded, titles, meta descripted . out of them, but when they went up on my photoshelter site they were nowhere to be seen on google (even months afterwards).  If someone was searching for images of "said monument" I should've been fairly near the top of google due to lack of coverage.  Even in google images there was nothing.

I blogged about it and that shot to the top almost instantly.  So I certainly think you couldn't just put all your images onto Photoshelter and hope they're found instantly like Paulie says.  But definitely using blogging to direct google to your site will help.  In the end, it wasn't worth the hassle for me.

When I was paying the best part of 240 a year it didn't really make financial sense to me personally.  Even though I actively blogged about the images for sale, I didn't do much outside of that if I'm honest.  I had one stock sale (personal license) for 5 over 3 years, which photoshelter took a fee, and paypal took a fee.  Print sales were slow too (my own fault) for weddings and portraits, and it didn't make financial sense.  I can see that it might to some though.


 

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