Hello,
I'm Marco Panzarella and, with some researchers from the Politecnico di Torino in Italy, I've been working at the website www.geostockphoto.com, which is a new stock photography marketplace for geotagged photos.
We are a start-up and we would like to know what you think about it since we believe that the advice and comments of the experts are essential to achieve a good product.
Thank you for your help! For any information please email me at [email protected].
Bye

edit: updated the subject to be more descriptve

so, mostly travel photos, landscapes, etc?

Thank you all for your comments!

We are an Italian startup so... yes, we're translating into english. Anyway, the "gratification" to the photographers is given by our high revenue (from 50% to 85%). Does it make sense?

We focus on photos related to the area where they were taken. Some of our categories are: landscape, animals, buildings, arts, foods... and almost everything is specific of a particular place.

We know very well how difficult is to enter the market but we did a market survey and we discovered that the geolocation is something that would bring great value to the sale of the photographs. If others want to replicate our idea, they must start a new marketplace since they do not have geolocation in their huge portfolio. Also other big players have their most profitable market in other kind of photos that we all know (sign/symbols, business...).

We also want to give more to photographers, such us:
- high-revenues
- opportunity to decide on pricing and licensing
- visibility (ie personal page with info and contacts)

We are also working on a map containing all photographers so customers will be able to ask new photos directly to photographers.

What do you think? We really like to get any feedback from you.

Thank you!!!

yes we know about DT and there is also another one in the market. But geotagging is not a requirement for them (DT does not even say anything in their homepage). We believe that we can compete to them if we make the map our core business... so all photos are geotagged on GeoStockPhoto but also photographers, new photo requests, events will have their own map in our vision.
There is the entire world of journalism (and others) that can't wait for it.

GeoStockPhoto is not an outlet since prices and licenses are chosen by photographers.

Jurnalism was just an example. We are also already in contact with some turist office of some big cities which would like to have a database of photos in order to promote their territory (in websites and promotional merchandising). We are also in contact with web agencies which work as search engine for private and local activities, they are looking for photos which can be automatically purchased and used in their customer's pages. Well, I can't say more publicly but we have explored a lot of sale channels specific for geotagged photos.

If people want a photo of a location, they can just put that location in the search box.  It's hard for new sites because they have to start with a very small collection of images and it appears that most buyers are happy with the sites they already use.

I'm struggling to see how geotagging is going to be a big enough attraction to buyers.  Isn't it going to be quite a lot of extra work for contributors as well or do you do all the geotagging?

I would like to try and register successfully, less buyer/seller but more exposure for my images

Thank you all again for your comments, we really appreciate them.

Thank Gillian, can you suggest another word?

About geolocation, I can say just two reasons why it is useful:
1) we found a lot of customers asking for geolocation. For example, we are agreeing a partnership with a company that provides wifi hotspots in Europe and wants to customize the login page to all their hotspot with photos of the area where they set up their hotspot. They have the hotspot location and want to exceed to beautiful photos with automatic calls to our server. There is no man who searches for the word "Dome of Milan". And like this there are many other examples.
2) keywording is always ambiguous because of the language itself (many places have the same name), because of the translations from different languages and because there are places that can not be precisely defined with words (think, for example to a specific location in the path of paris-dakar or a specific place where there has neither address nor name). If you write "Milan"+"Duomo" you expect to find what you are looking for, if you go to "Duomo di Milano" in the map you do actually find it!

In order to submit photos on GeoStockPhoto you have to insert:
1) Title
2) Category
3) Location (in the map)
All other fields (included keywords) are optional.
We are also working on an mobile app for tracking and geotagging your photos taken by any camera. You should register to GeoStockPhoto and we will let you know when it is ready the first release.

Also, we are just starting a new market with still few photographers and we already have customers waiting for us, so all photos that we will sell may be yours :-)

Please keep on giving us feedbacks so we can understand your needs and what we have to push in communication with all of our photographers.

Thanks!

I'm afraid I'd suggest losing the whole thing, cos it makes me laugh, and I'm not a 15 year old boy... but still! the "!" is also not used widely, except by teenage girls and rubbish marketing types who think red and yellow are still great colours.

I would also say the capital "p" in "Photos" is making me cringe. Why the random capital? Lots of people do that, and it's just wrong. I'd rather see no capitals at all - much friendlier.

"sell and buy photos from all the world" should probably be " ... from all over the world" and that full stop ("period" for US/canadian types) is just ugly there.

the "enjoy selling them with gratification" is getting more and more lewd as I read it, lol. (esp if you read the "you do nothing, we do everything" .... um, can you come visit me sometime?  )  so yeah, just scrap it. you don't need that line at all on your english page.

I uploaded 1 photo to see what the site was like.  Works quite well but after submitting I noticed I hadn't placed the tag on the map correctly.  Hope that can be adjusted later.

Should a tag be from where the photo was taken or of the main subject in the photo?

Gillian, can you send us your cv? :-)
We are already working on a new homepage since the one we have right now does not look professional and was intended only for photographers. We will consider all your feedback.

ha!  di niente   enjoy the freebie.

I reach the site with firefox, it's working.

I uploading a few images with FTP 3 hrs ago, but still not apprear on the page. the username and pass seems is assigned by the site automatically, maybe these images goto another guy's page.

Just noticed that the original size has an extended license by default.  The default price is 10 Euro.  I think that should be at least 50 Euro.  Buyers have no problem paying $100 or more on other sites for an extended license.