Author Topic: Are you using Photoshelter? (Read 13289 times)

leaf · « **on:** August 21, 2009, 02:25 »

Who here is using PhotoShelter, and if so how?

Just as storage, as ftp broadcast site, as sales avenue?

leaf · « **Reply #1 on:** August 21, 2009, 02:35 »

Here is the pricing page

http://pa.photoshelter.com/tour/pricing

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #2 on:** August 23, 2009, 15:26 »

I signed up a while ago for the basic deal and am just now evaluating it as a backend for my website to sell RM direct. Maybe also prints from events.

Photoshelter seems pretty decent so far but I'm wondering if dropping the $30 per month selling direct is even worth it.

Every time I hear about somebody selling stock through their website it's occasional onesie twosie stuff. It seems to make more sense for wedding, portrait, and event photographers to sell stuff to existing clients.

Are stock photo buyers really buying in volume from photographers or just from agencies?

Randy McKown · « **Reply #3 on:** September 02, 2009, 23:53 »

I'm not one for paying a monthly fee to be able to sell photos online

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #4 on:** September 03, 2009, 08:15 »

Quote from: xposurepro on September 02, 2009, 23:53

I'm not one for paying a monthly fee to be able to sell photos online

What would you suggest as an alternative?

jwohlfeil · « **Reply #5 on:** September 03, 2009, 15:58 »

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on August 23, 2009, 15:26

Are stock photo buyers really buying in volume from photographers or just from agencies?

There is the BIG question, are photo purchasers looking outside of their subscriptions? And if they are, how often do they drift away from Microstock?

I keep reading about how people will still pay more for images, while we see microstock sales soaring and RF Stock companies entering the arena, and sales on Alamy very slow.

Adeptris · « **Reply #6 on:** September 04, 2009, 00:35 »

Quote from: jwohlfeil on September 03, 2009, 15:58

There is the BIG question, are photo purchasers looking outside of their subscriptions? And if they are, how often do they drift away from Microstock?

I keep reading about how people will still pay more for images, while we see microstock sales soaring and RF Stock companies entering the arena, and sales on Alamy very slow.

Not all photo purchasers use subscription or microstock, many are tied into accounts with an agency and cannot shop around, contrary to what you may read here price point is not always the reason to purchase an image, buyers are looking for the right content and if it comes at micro prices that is a bonus as they would have likely paid a bit more.

Trends at Alamy cannot be compared to microstock, thier last quarter reported 83% editorial, 82% Rights Managed and 91% of sales were Account Sales, the pressure at Alamy is the drop in newspaper and magazine sales, most of the images sold could not be found on microstock websites.

Photoshelter has a good interface but that will not get you sales, it is only worthwhile if you can drive buyers to your website and you have the exclusive images they want, if you are not prepared to put in the work then it has no real value over other off or online storage options or cheaper website templates.

There are many little packages out there, I found this one ASP and if you want to display and use a contact page for sales you might look at this free PHP one, if you have bigger bucks and want a full stock site then there is this one, you have to look at the on-going costs of services like PhotoShelter.

David

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #7 on:** September 04, 2009, 05:54 »

Quote from: Adeptris on September 04, 2009, 00:35

Photoshelter has a good interface but that will not get you sales, it is only worthwhile if you can drive buyers to your website and you have the exclusive images they want, if you are not prepared to put in the work then it has no real value over other off or online storage options or cheaper website templates.

Okay so let's say that you've done a great job of driving a ton of traffic to your site from SEO, social sites, etc. And your site has quality stock that normally sells pretty well with agencies. Would this create decent sales volume or just occasional sales?

Adeptris · « **Reply #8 on:** September 04, 2009, 06:30 »

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on September 04, 2009, 05:54

Okay so let's say that you've done a great job of driving a ton of traffic to your site from SEO, social sites, etc. And your site has quality stock that normally sells pretty well with agencies. Would this create decent sales volume or just occasional sales?

That would depend on where the traffic is comimg from, if you are social networking with microstock buyers and they know that the images are with other agencies, or if your customers are not coming from microsite networking then they would not be looking at microstock for your images, but if your own website links to your microstock portfolios then that is where they might go to buy.

the best way would be to have images on your website that are not on the microstock sites, and price that the occasional sale value will part compensate for low volume, as a stock photographer without a niche product or other photography services a website is just a nice-to-have and cosmetic, not really cost effective for shooting stock.

One thing that Photoshelter delivers over other products is being able to setup the pricing as RF or RM with different profiles, restrictions, sectors and useages, but this all comes at a cost, maybe we should get together and produce a package that we can all use, with default features that we all want.

David

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #9 on:** September 04, 2009, 07:07 »

The cost is only $30 per month for the full featured integrated package but I'd rather not just toss a few hundred dollars out the window. It would probably take at least a year before you'd be able to measure results. Plus all the time to integrate it with your site, upload, etc.

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #10 on:** September 04, 2009, 07:43 »

Now that I think about it, the potential buyers would probably either be somebody straying from an agency or a Googler.

Why would a buyer stray from a macro or micro agency when they already have the comfort of one trusted place they can get all of their stuff from? Because they're looking for some obscure photo the agency doesn't have or lower prices. So onesie-twosies or bargain hunters?

What would the Googler be looking for? Prints? Cheap or free images?

And if a niche is key, don't most agencies have all of the subjects pretty well covered?

GeoPappas · « **Reply #11 on:** September 04, 2009, 07:45 »

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on September 04, 2009, 07:07

The cost is only $30 per month for the full featured integrated package...

Plus they will take 10% of any sales you have. So it ends up being $360/year + 10% of sales.

There are alternatives to Photoshelter as well, including smugmug.com ($150/year + 15% of sales) and zenfolio.com ($100/year + 8-12% of sales).

If you are just looking to store photos for DR (disaster recovery) purposes, then I would recommend Amazon S3 + JungleDisk (jungledisk.com).

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #12 on:** September 04, 2009, 07:57 »

But all of the other sites like SmugMug don't offer a full system for RM. The Photoshelter RM system is similar to Getty and Alamy where it allows buyers to calculate price based on usage.

jwohlfeil · « **Reply #13 on:** September 04, 2009, 09:28 »

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on September 04, 2009, 07:43

What would the Googler be looking for? Prints? Cheap or free images?

In my opinion - the Googler is looking for FREE images.

Photoshelter mentions they offer great SEO - what is that (not SEO, I know what that is, what are they offering?) I picked a random photographer from their site and googled their exact photo title and it didn't come up in 15 pages. So what SEO are they offering?

I read it best - the direct sales model (Photoshelter, SmugMug, Pictage, Zenfolio) can offer a photographer an opportunity to fill the gap between Microstock and the Big3 agencies. The question is - is it worth the money? Even if you sell them at Micro-competitive prices, you keep 90%. A $12 sale will pay you $10.80 -- not a $0.30 sub.

More and more it seems buyers are LOCKED into subscriptions.

I am also a buyer and we stick to the sub 80% of the time, and rarely move up to RF - most clients don't want to pay the additional cost when they too have access to iStock and others online.

So I am wondering if there is a place for Micro-priced images on a direct sale site - and not the $300-$600 prices I see on Photoshelter.

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #14 on:** September 04, 2009, 10:04 »

From what I've seen so far the Photoshelter SEO seems improved but not complete. They've added sitemaps and better content formatting but some of the most important stuff, like a search friendly URL, is still missing.

Plus, the technical stuff behind SEO is only part of it. If you don't know how to write content for all of the individual technical pieces of SEO the technology part won't help you much.

And from seeing a lot of the stuff on micro sites and photographers own websites it's pretty clear a lot of photographers have little understanding of SEO.

travelstock · « **Reply #15 on:** October 07, 2009, 02:10 »

I've been using photoshelter for a while now as an FTP broadcast site, but have been trying out isyndicata to replace that, and although its not perfect yet, isyndicata seems to be faster and easier to use. Using the $9.99 per month plan has basically been enough for this purpose, but in terms of setting it up to host images you obviously have to pay more.

This is probably going slightly off topic, but seeing as I think you're talking about using it to host images for sale, it may be relevant... I've been looking at options to host images in a way that they're available for print use so obviously photoshelter was one of these. I think I'll end up going with the Pro package from Smugmug which seems to be able to do most of what Photoshelter can (except FTP broadcast) and seems to be better set up for social networking and blogging use.

I'm currently using a free 15 day trial of Smugmug to host the gallery on my website - coupon code is MsL5wMS7s3tmU if anyone is interested in the $5 off a subscription.

After spending about 2 days getting a basic gallery set up and to look basically like the rest of my site, and trying it out with sending files over from isyndicata etc. I must say that overall I'm pretty sure that I now have some tools to improve my workflow and sell prints online. Now I just need buyers

An added feature that I wasn't aware of was that you can set up Smugmug to sell digital licenses with no restriction on price. Their commission for the transaction is 15% - whereas photoshelter only charge 10% - this may be relevant to people who expect to sell a lot through their sites. Zenfolio is another option, but from what I can see it doesn't seem to be as customisable just yet. If anyone has a different experience with zenfolio I'd appreciate hearing about it!

If anyone's interested in seeing what the galleries look like although I've still only got about 350 photos in there and haven't customised the layouts yet - hit the galleries link on my website (link in signature) or any of the thumbnails on the frontpage. Of course any suggestions are welcome!

eppic · « **Reply #16 on:** October 07, 2009, 07:24 »

I had the first level paid account with PS back when they were dabbling in stock sales last year. I cancelled m account with them shortly after they pulled out of the stock end of things about a year ago and went with a Zenfolio pro account, which I find much more user friendly and better suited to my needs.
I like the fact that Mpix is hooked to Zenfolio for prints as I know that they do a great job and are muchbetter recognized than Photoshelter's EZpics.
I only sell my images as prints on Zen, but they do have image download options too. Overall I like Zen much better than PS.

FD · « **Reply #17 on:** December 28, 2009, 10:42 »

To revive this old thread, PhotoShelter is offering a free BASIC trial of 30 days. I uploaded some stuff, just to find out the interface is a bit cranky. The first time moving to galleries worked, the second time it didn't for all. I'm not interested in online storage since MostPhotos is free and for TIFFs etc... the bandwidth would be too costly with my ISP.

Did anybody had sales there, to justify their huge fees?

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #18 on:** December 28, 2009, 13:53 »

I signed up for the 30 day free trial.

The configuration options are excellent. Fotoquote is nice. Custom website templates and integration work well. Quite a few SEO tools. The entire system is very slick and gives buyers a very similar experience to using a stock agency site like Getty RM/RF.

But... Photoshelter technically doesn't seem to be well liked by search engines. And their sitemap only links gallery pages (

) and not the individual image pages. I'm pretty good with SEO and after submitting a PS sitemap to Google almost two weeks ago it still hasn't been indexed. This usually takes a few days. When my new images go live on iStock Google indexes them sometimes the same day. So while PS has SEO tools and all kinds of advice, their site seems almost invisible to Google.

For now PS looks like a great option if you already have a client base. If you're looking to tap into the supposedly huge Google buyer base then it looks to be a waste of money.

I'll give it a couple more weeks and see what happens.

FD · « **Reply #19 on:** December 28, 2009, 14:23 »

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on December 28, 2009, 13:53

So while PS has SEO tools and all kinds of advice, their site seems almost invisible to Google.
For now PS looks like a great option if you already have a client base.

1. Yes their SEO manuals are great, and I all downloaded them.
2. The only reason to have an account at PS would be their market presence. If you have to do your own marketing and SEO, Clustershot at 20$ per year only is much better value for money.

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #20 on:** December 28, 2009, 14:59 »

Quote from: FD-amateur on December 28, 2009, 14:23

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on December 28, 2009, 13:53
So while PS has SEO tools and all kinds of advice, their site seems almost invisible to Google.
For now PS looks like a great option if you already have a client base.
1. Yes their SEO manuals are great, and I all downloaded them.
2. The only reason to have an account at PS would be their market presence. If you have to do your own marketing and SEO, Clustershot at 20$ per year only is much better value for money.

I checked out Clustershot and it doesn't look like they have a Rights Managed license option or quoting system so it's of no use to me. And although I didn't look at the website integration they do links which are usually poorly integrated and clunky like LicenseStream.

Photoshelter seems to have the right system. But the SEO isn't there yet.

FD · « **Reply #21 on:** December 28, 2009, 15:09 »

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on December 28, 2009, 14:59

I checked out Clustershot and it doesn't look like they have a Rights Managed license option or quoting system so it's of no use to me.

You will have to do the integration yourself, correct. A big problem is that thumbs and download links have a different PID. They also don't have usage restrictions like Editorial vs Commercial. Could be solved by categories above albums but they don't have that yet. They do have a reliable cart. The real problem with all this SEO (it has been mentioned) is that it attracts random Google traffic from non-buyers.

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Author Topic: Are you using Photoshelter? (Read 13289 times)

leaf

leaf

PaulieWalnuts

Randy McKown

PaulieWalnuts

jwohlfeil

Adeptris

PaulieWalnuts

Adeptris

PaulieWalnuts

PaulieWalnuts

GeoPappas

PaulieWalnuts

jwohlfeil

PaulieWalnuts

travelstock

eppic

FD

PaulieWalnuts

FD

PaulieWalnuts

FD

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