Corporate clients are a mix-match ... they can pay by CC the day of the shoot if there is an employee with that access available or they can choose for us to invoice them, which I just send a basic paypal invoice from my phone on the spot. It pretty much depends on the size of the company and what we're doing. If I'm just popping in to shoot a quick headshot for the CEO, they often pay that day. If we're scheduling a couple hours to shoot headshots for 100 corporate executives then they often choose to invoice.

Publication clients pretty much always require invoicing and are often slower at payment too (many like to pay all their company invoices in bulk on a specific day of the month ... its annoying)

General Public clients ALWAYS pay 100% in full before the shoot even takes place. This is going to be for senior pictures, family portraits, boudoir, weddings, etc.

For weddings & events, we're always paid in full and well in advance. They're normally booking us out up to a year in advance anyway. So, there's more time to work with payments, etc.

For other forms of portraiture, we accept payment at anytime up to the beginning of the session and taken on-location .. we're always paid for these sessions before the camera comes out of the bag and print orders are paid in full before any orders are sent to the lab. Model portfolios are an exception and need to pay before the day of the shoot .. simply put.. many of these clients can be a bit flakey (true stereotype) and I'm not driving to a location without payment only for the model to never show up.

For portrait print orders over $1000 we will break the payment into a max of 3 monthly payments .. however, the order is still not sent to the lab until the final payment is made. No refunds are issued for these payment plans. We do this because I don't want to deal with storing orders for 3 months at a time. There is also the occasional situation were a client makes 2 payments and then disappears completely ... again, we're not in the business of running a warehouse.

Contracts are used for corporate clients when applicable and for the general public but only on weddings & events. We do not make portrait clients sign contracts, except in the situation of senior pictures where that student is also a part of our spokesmodel program.

If you will be focusing on print sales opposed to a 100% digital delivery, I strongly advise avoiding online carts entirely. You will NOT generate as much profits. These should always be done through a sales appointment. Show your images online and let them order at their leisure from home and they're going to put it off .. budget .. order the minimal. Wow them with a great initial image viewing experience, showcase all your products where they can touch them with their hands and discuss the options and you will see more significant up-sells. This is where you see clients who originally budgeted $400 deciding to take advantage of your payment plan and placing a $1600 order instead.

Quote from: Maximilian on November 28, 2014, 23:17
Germany. I  tested it again several times. connection - fast but,
image loading 20 sec and at afternoon close to 60sec.
50k internet connection, so no problem here.
Good luck with pixyloo, let us know when we can start uploading some images.

Ok that looks like the results we recorded for the homepage in Germany (which is a temporary layout that is being changed before launch) .. How does a product page like this one look? .. http://pixyloo.com/downloads/sexy-dirty-blonde-girl/ ... our spreadsheet shows me that it's loading in Frankfurt, Germany at 5.6 seconds ... which will be faster when we activate the CDN before our official launch.

Quote from: Maximilian on November 28, 2014, 19:41
no answer yet.. why ask for contributors and let them wait so long?
I just want to test with a few images how that site works. Supporting PIXYLOO this way too.
I checked your site a few minutes ago, do you have a small server (low) ?
1 minute and a few seconds until 100% site content is visible.. 

I also checked your script a bit: "just a word press theme?" 

This is our pre-launch phase and we just began collecting applications for our initial round of artists.
We have not activated our CDN yet but even with that in consideration our code is still outperforming 3 out 4 of the top tier sites in the benchmarks for Google Page Speed and all 4 top tiers for Bing & Yahoo.
In the US & Canada we have 2 second load times, 4-5 across Europe. The only places we have seen excessive load times are in not all but some areas of China, Australia & in Argentina. If you're experiencing 1 minute load times, I'd be very interested to know where you're located and what type of internet connection you have. Feel free to PM me with any technical specs.
YES to Wordpress. It's an extremely powerful foundation to build on. If CNN can support their massive amount of traffic using it, we should be just fine.  .. still there's a lot of custom modifications I'm giving our coder to wok on.

Quote from: Mantis on November 28, 2014, 19:58
I applied too and never heard back. Guess they don't like my work.

We will begin contacting artists after the first of the new year to be a part of our official launch. I just added this notice to the application page to avoid any confusion and we will begin sending out email notifications stating the same. So, if you haven't been invited yet it doesn't mean we don't like your work. 

Quote from: Ranker on November 23, 2014, 00:39
Who keeps a hi res gallery online these days? Seems a bit naive.

Not me ... but you'd be amazed how many Flickr people do though. Of course for our purposes it doesn't have to be a pretty gallery on Flickr either .. It could also simply be a link to a hidden page on a Wordpress install that nobody else will find without being told. I don't expect to see a lot of applications done this way. I just threw that in because I didn't want people who were new to microstock to feel that they were being excluded from applying.

Quote from: Ranker on November 22, 2014, 11:15

QuoteWe prefer to see current stock portfolios on existing agencies before considering you for an invitation. If you link to a non-agency portfolio, make sure that we can evaluate your images at high resolution.

Which agency allows you to see images at hight resolution? Are you buying images to check them? What is the difference between a non agency portfolio and a portfolio on an agency?

None of them. But if we see that you have a lot of images on XYZ Agency that give us an idea that you are aware of fundamental QC issues .. like focus, trademark removal, color noise, etc. For non-stockers, we want to see high-res galleries because we will need to look into those issues ourselves.

Quote from: Fairplay on November 22, 2014, 17:03

Quote from: stockuser on November 22, 2014, 10:07
I'm not a native speaker but I think 'based out of USA' means 'located in the USA but doing business worldwide' for a non-native speaker this could be easily misunderstood as 'not located in the USA'. I think this is the way fairplay understood it.

Yes, that's exactly what happened! 
Randy Mckown, please accept my apologies!

No need for apologies my friend. I'm sure that if I traveled to your native country I would misunderstand people on a daily basis. There's no harm in it. 

Quote from: tickstock on November 21, 2014, 22:06

Quote from: PIXYLOO on November 21, 2014, 21:47
Now at IS you can get a high-res image just like ours for only $1 more .. but that is also restricted to only images in the essential collection. If the image you need is in their signature collection the price automatically triples.

Exclusive images are a different thing.  You are offering nonexclusive images for the same price as other sites.  I can't go to iStock find an exclusive image and then go to your site to buy it cheaper but I could go to your site, find an image, and then go somewhere else and buy it cheaper.  There has to be a reason a buyer will go to your site.  Saying that images at your site are cheaper than images exclusive to another site probably won't be a huge selling point but some other site saying they have the exact same images for cheaper seems to me to be a good selling point.
You talk about branding "It's about the branding and the customer experience."  How is your site going to be branded differently than the 50 other sites that sell basically the same exact content in order for it to stand out?  From what you've written it looks like you are going to be much more selective than the other sites but the images you have on there now are fairly ordinary stock photos (I'm not trying to be disrespectful, think what you see when you go to a site like Stocksy, it's something different and has unique content).  Wasn't that Crestock's business model?  If you are selective to the point of differentiating yourself I think you'll have a lot of angry people on this forum, they don't like rejections for bad images just wait till they get rejections for good images.

You also didn't answer if you would need a print and a separate web license if you wanted to use the content in both places?  It's unclear to me from my quick browsing.

A buyer could go to Agency A and search for the image they need for the project they're working on. Once they found it they could theoretically hunt down that same image that is being offered on Agency B .. but it's a level 5 image there and costs more .. so they proceed to find that image on Agency C where they can finally get the best price. This kind of falls into a "what if" category. While a buyer could do that .. most don't have the time or they simply don't care. What they care about is getting what they need so they can complete their project and move on to the next one. When you start heading down the road of let's do this cheaper than the next guy .. whose also thinking let's do this even cheaper .. what you end up with is a whole lot of 25 cent royalties .. that's not a good direction to travel.

Naturally, there are those who try to save every single penny they can. That's fine .. those people are going to be sub buyers somewhere else no matter what. However, that doesn't mean all consumers think that way. There's plenty of other consumers who will be loyal to their favorite local store and pay well above retail prices simply because they think the store smells like fresh baked cookies when they walk in the door ... or because when they checkout the clerks are always talking to them about something they're interested in ... or because the store next door just tosses their items in a plain bag and the store that charges more uses cute designer bags and throws a lollipop inside the bag before they give it to you. It's the little things that add up. Right now we're in pre-launch so I would agree 100% that we definitely will look no different that most competitors ... but it's the little things we do over time that start adding up into something different. What you see now is not going to be the same thing you find a year from now. Nothing good comes overnight 

Sorry I didn't catch the license question. That info hasn't been added to the site yet but no, buyers will not be required to by a web standard if the buy a print standard .. web usage will be included with a print sale. Before we officially launch and begin marketing to buyers, that type of information will be clearly stated and easily spotted on every product page.

Quote from: tickstock on November 21, 2014, 20:59

Quote from: PIXYLOO on November 21, 2014, 19:23

Quote from: tickstock on November 21, 2014, 18:00
I don't like the name but the terms seem fair.  What makes this site any different from all the other sites?  By that I mean if you are offering the same content as everyone else why will buyers go there, especially when I can find that content at lower prices on other sites?

It depends on what agency a buyer is comparing us to. We're pricing by usage and not image size. With that in mind our $10 web standard license is very competitive and in many cases more affordable than quite a few of the popular credit based micros where the same file size costs up to more than double our pricing .. forgive me for not being more specific but I'm not fond of namedropping .. When it comes to the extended usage .. yeah we're more pricy than the typical micro but we're also more affordable than many mid-stock sites. It's impossible to compete with everyone in terms of price because all the agencies have their prices just randomly scattered all across the board. However, one of our big focus points is competing on improving the buyers workflow and helping them find what they need faster. It's more difficult to see this in action right now because the site isn't loaded up with images. As it fills up this will become more apparent.

I understand you are pricing by usage but why would a buyer go to this site and pay $10 for web usage when they could go to iStock and pay almost the same for web + print usage?  Or why would a buyer spend $25 for print usage (does print usage include web usage or would you need to buy two licenses?) when they could spend about $10 at sites like iStock, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, etc...  I'm not sure which sites are charging nearly double for nonexclusive content, iStock charges $8-$12, Shutterstock $9-$15, Dreamstime about $11-$15, etc... with pretty much all those sites charging less for ELs.  I think you can't compare midstock or macrostock prices to these images since they are being licensed on other microstock sites, that's the competition isn't it?  My question is still what makes this site better for a buyer than any of the other sites that offer the same content?  You said something vague about improving buyers workflow, what does that mean?

All of our images will be equal to a max image size so on DT for example depending on how many sales the image has it will cost 10 Credits to 19 Credits which actually comes out to $13.60 to $25.84  ... that price can be dropped as low as $8.80 to $16.72 but you'll need to spend nearly a couple grand all at once buying bulk credits to get that discount. Now at IS you can get a high-res image just like ours for only $1 more .. but that is also restricted to only images in the essential collection. If the image you need is in their signature collection the price automatically triples.

Here's an earlier comment that might help give a quick idea about what I mean when I talk about buyer workflow & the customer experience.

Quote from: PIXYLOO on November 21, 2014, 13:46

Quote from: Mantis on November 21, 2014, 12:16

I went traveling after I got your email, and forgot to respond, so above are my initial thoughts.  Micro stock is on a critical mass downward spiral in terms of contributor royalties and agency honesty, integrity and trust. It will be very hard to compete in this bubble in a way that drives success and good partnerships, but I am behind you.

We went with 40% because out of our commission, we're going to be initially using 10% for core expenses and then giving the rest back to the buyers to stimulate sales. The more we give back to buyers .. the more they're going to spend .. which goes back into the contributors pockets. We also need to have enough of a buffer between non-exclusive % and the exclusive benefits once we put those into place .. or else there would be no "real" advantage to being exclusive. Of course once the buyer base is established and stable it's more of an issue of what's going to make our contributors happy and still be sustainable. You can always make people happy by giving them a raise later .. it's when a business start out too generous and has to make temporary cutbacks later that gets people steaming.

Yes, the entire subscription issue is an annoying hurdle. To be perfectly blunt, the sub model should have never been created in the first place. Obviously, not the creation of anyone who has ever worked a day as a professional photographer. Too late now .. but we will not encourage them. Not only does the sub model insult the photographer .. it rips off the buyer, who typically doesn't max their downloads due to fluctuating workloads and the fact that 2 days of the week they're not even in the office. The only ones who benefit are the agencies who offer them ... get paid for a sale without delivering a product or paying royalties on the sale. I know we could profit a lot more by offering them but the fact that I shoot for a living and my personal ethics won't allow it.

Honestly, those who get in from the beginning are going to have the advantage. Do buyers need that image of an isolated tomato? Most definitely and we want to make that available for them. Are we going to continue accepting thousands of isolated tomatoes for the next decade? Nope.
We're going to bring in new photographers in phases. The ones now are going to have a lot more flexibility in what they upload than those who join a year from now.

No, we don't expect a problem with the 40 bazillion images issue anytime in the near future. LOL .. I've sat down with designers and content providers and a common complaint is that they can't find what they're looking for quickly because there's simply too much crap to wade through. Back to that isolated tomato .. how long does it take to find the image you want for a project when you have to sit there browsing though page after page after page of tomatoes that all pretty much look identical. We don't want to offer designers 50,000 images of tomatoes to choose from. We want them to search tomato and be given a decently sized yet diverse selection of quality tomato shots that they can quickly choose from and get back to work on their project. The designer is happy because we've taken away their frustration and the companies CFO is happy because their staff isn't wasting man hours.

I don't want to use Stockfresh as an example because I have nothing to do with them and I don't wish to speak negatively about any of the agencies for that matter. However, I think a great example to get my point across is simply using photography studios in general. For the last decade my wife & I have owned a portrait studio in our metro area. I don't even bother counting the competing studios in this city anymore .. there are literally thousands of them here within a 30 mile radius who charge a fraction of what we do ... we know people who have had their all day wedding shot for 50 bucks. However, we still shoot more clients every year than 99% of them and commonly have portrait clients drive up to 2 1/2 hours to get here. My point being it is possible to operate successfully without even trying to compete with everybody. One of the things that made our studio one of the top studios in the region was not entirely our skilled experience but the human experience we created for our clients .. that's something we want to bring to PIXYLOO.

and thanks for your detailed feedback .. it's greatly appreciated.

You also have to keep in mind that price is not always a factor for many consumers .. why would I pay $15 for a small coffee and muffin at Starbucks when I could get a pretty tasty muffin and an extra large coffee at the gas station / convenience store for $3? It's about the branding and the customer experience.
We've been offering an add-on to our portrait clients for years called "Rock the Dress - Tropical" high school seniors pay us an extra $150 for a 30 minute add-on where we let them put on "their own" prom dress and we shoot them in a local waterfall. They NEVER even purchase prints from this add-on but nearly all of them upgrade to it. They could put on a dress and roll around in the water all day every day for free .. but they pay us for it because they want to have that experience ... and we've branded it to the point that's it's no longer just about having a portrait in a waterfall .. it's about us photographing them in the waterfall.
Regardless of what business you go into, wether you're dealing with business professionals, brides or teenage girls ... branding and experience are 2 vital keys to success. That's something I have always stressed on when giving lectures.

Quote from: dirkr on November 21, 2014, 20:31

Quote from: PIXYLOO on November 21, 2014, 20:11
After Dirkr pointed out the portable DixiLoo there's no way we can change our name .. it's just too funny. 

The funny thing is: These "Dixi"-Loos are very well-known here in Germany. It's one of those cases where a brand name becomes a synonym for the product. If anybody in Germany refers to a portable toilette (the kind that is used at construction sites or any bigger events like concerts or festivals) they will always talk about a "Dixi-Klo" (where Klo is the colloquial expression for toilette).
Until this thread I hadn't realised that this is obviously not an international recognized brand name 

Yeah we'd never heard of a DixiLoo. Years ago we had a popular brand here called "Johnny on the Spot" that had such a monopoly everybody referred to all portable toilets by that name .. up until recent years. These days it's more common to just find .. I guess you'd call it generic white labeled portable toilets where companies buy non-branded toilets, slap their company logo on it which usually says something boring like "Joe's Portable Toilet Rental Service" and then rent them out to the same types of places that you find your DixiLoos. It's always interesting to find out how different things can be when you venture outside of your culture.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on November 21, 2014, 19:52
Two things i noticed when I looked at the site today:

1) you don't show the pixel dimensions of the image. I know you have a minimum, but a print buyer will need to know how large it is to have an idea if it'll work for them. For very large applications, an 8MP image might not do but a 21MP image will

2) I can't go from a search or browsing on the home page to the detail page just by clicking on the thumbnail. I have to click inside the detail box in the center. That's massively irritating and I can't see how it adds anything useful.

I sent in an application

Hey Jo Ann. Yes the buyers absolutely need to know that information and the EXIF automation is actually being worked on now. That's something that will definitely be in place before we begin marketing to buyers.

I agree the details box in the thumbnails does seem annoying by itself. Right now it's there because we might be adding a couple more features that will appear alongside it that will at which point it will make more sense. However, if we decide not to implement the other features on the thumbnails then that details button will either be history or restyled appropriately. 

Quote from: sweetgirll on November 21, 2014, 18:16
Hi,

Pixyloo's site is looking good...

Are those photos on the site yours? They are really nice.

I didn't see any "about us" page with the name of the owners or further information.... is nice to know who are the people running a company, what country / state the company is based of.

Good luck with the new site.

Yes those are mine and thank you very much. This is the beginning of our pre-launch phase where our time will be spent recruiting photographers, curating the initial image collection, preparing site documentation and so on. Think of it as a beta release for a new software application. All of you artists are seeing what takes place before the finished product is released to the public. About me pages and things of that nature will be added but once the technical aspects were streamlined and the business plan in place .. it was time to get the ball rolling on seeking contributors .. because the process of filling the site with images is the most time consuming. However, I have seen others in the past fall into the "these people are hiding something" simply because they were also in the pre-launch phase. With that said, I'm open to any questions or concerns during our pre-launch.

Just some quick info while I'm on the topic .. my name is Randy McKown. Photography was passed on to me by my father going on 3 decades ago, my wife is a photographer, which together we've ran one of the top studios in the area together and now our daughter is working on joining in the family tradition. We are located in a surrounding community of the Kansas City metro. We do not have any investors or plan to acquire any. Our studio has been around for a decade and PIXYLOO is the next step in expanding on our existing business model. We'll get a more appropriate about us on the website before official launch .. and hopefully it won't be too boring because I'm not a fan of talking about myself

Quote from: Tror on November 21, 2014, 18:27

Quote from: PIXYLOO on November 21, 2014, 11:29
Royalties :: 40% for non-exclusivity.

I`m out. Anything below 50% is not acceptable for a newcomer.

Further thoughts:

1. No offical information displayed: Who are you? What is your VAT number? Where is your company registered? Do you give official invoices? Hiding behind a nice website was possible 10 years ago. Today its a nogo. Looks like the domain is registered to Randy McKown.
2. Nice concept.
3. You might consider changing your name.

That's perfectly understandable. We know that we cannot be the best fit for everybody. We're still a baby company at this point and we won't be suitable for a number of photographers until we've grown and proven to be a worthy choice. It's all good. 

We have not officially launched yet. All legal requirements and documentations will be made available as they are required and completed before we launch.

After Dirkr pointed out the portable DixiLoo there's no way we can change our name .. it's just too funny. 

Quote from: tickstock on November 21, 2014, 18:00
I don't like the name but the terms seem fair.  What makes this site any different from all the other sites?  By that I mean if you are offering the same content as everyone else why will buyers go there, especially when I can find that content at lower prices on other sites?

It depends on what agency a buyer is comparing us to. We're pricing by usage and not image size. With that in mind our $10 web standard license is very competitive and in many cases more affordable than quite a few of the popular credit based micros where the same file size costs up to more than double our pricing .. forgive me for not being more specific but I'm not fond of namedropping .. When it comes to the extended usage .. yeah we're more pricy than the typical micro but we're also more affordable than many mid-stock sites. It's impossible to compete with everyone in terms of price because all the agencies have their prices just randomly scattered all across the board. However, one of our big focus points is competing on improving the buyers workflow and helping them find what they need faster. It's more difficult to see this in action right now because the site isn't loaded up with images. As it fills up this will become more apparent.

Quote from: bunhill on November 21, 2014, 17:47
How are you dealing with the whole withholding tax issue wrt non US contributors ? Are you deducting US withholding taxes ? Also - will you be applying sales taxes (TVA, VAT etc) to customers where applicable - e.g. those in EU countries ?

No different than other businesses. I do not handle our accounting so excuse me if I don't word something properly but basically you'll need to complete a W-8BEN and there's a 30% withholding .. unless your in a country that has a tax treaty with us .. in which case it will be between 0-15% depending on the country. Yes we are also required to apply sales tax to the EUs which is built into the system. I know ... taxes suck.

Quote from: Shooterguy on November 21, 2014, 17:37
Based purely on the honesty and quality of what you've written in this thread, I'm actually tempted to give you a chance as a contributor! Are you available for in-person meetings if I should stop by while in town?

I hear the word meeting and instantly get bored LOL .. just bring your camera and we'll go shoot something cool 

Quote from: Shooterguy on November 21, 2014, 17:43
And question #2: How do I communicate to you, in my application on your web site, that the body of work you'll see of mine on agency XYZ is older and doesn't necessarily represent what I'd submit to you?

Is your portfolio extremely out of date compared to the work you do now? If it is, go ahead and include the link anyway and then either PM here or shoot me a message through the PIXYLOO support page with any other links you have to something more current even if it's a smaller collection on Flickr or your own website.

Quote from: Noedelhap on November 21, 2014, 17:02
I assume you're not offering vectors?

Initially we're not offering vectors but that's subject to change in the future.

Quote from: rimglow on November 21, 2014, 14:21
Are you located in Ann Arbor, MI or Kansas?

just outside the Kansas City metro on the Missouri side.

Quote from: dirkr on November 21, 2014, 12:48
Thanks. If you accept upsized images (as long as the result is sharp enough) I might do that for those that are good enough to start with.
All newer images are big enough anyway.

And your name: you're just one letter off to make it sound like that: http://www.toitoidixi.de/en/produkte/toilettenkabinen/DIXI-B.php   

LMAO .. I'm stealing the idea for that sign and putting it on our bathroom door.

Quote from: Ranker on November 21, 2014, 13:29
8.2mp, you just wiped out 250 of my best selling images. This wont be a good marriage.

Like I told Dirkr .. as long as you can upsize without noticeably hurting the quality it's ok. I know a lot of people are accustomed to being told by that they can't upsize. We do inspect everything at 100% of course but we're not so .. how should I put this .. anal when it comes to certain aspects of the review process. For example ... we know that ISO grain and color noise are two completely different things and that shooting a shallow DOF at f/2 does not automatically mean the image is out of focus .. of course if you have some shots from back in the day on a 2MP consumer level digital .. you're probably up the creek without a paddle when it comes to upsizing. 

Quote from: Mantis on November 21, 2014, 12:16

I went traveling after I got your email, and forgot to respond, so above are my initial thoughts.  Micro stock is on a critical mass downward spiral in terms of contributor royalties and agency honesty, integrity and trust. It will be very hard to compete in this bubble in a way that drives success and good partnerships, but I am behind you.

We went with 40% because out of our commission, we're going to be initially using 10% for core expenses and then giving the rest back to the buyers to stimulate sales. The more we give back to buyers .. the more they're going to spend .. which goes back into the contributors pockets. We also need to have enough of a buffer between non-exclusive % and the exclusive benefits once we put those into place .. or else there would be no "real" advantage to being exclusive. Of course once the buyer base is established and stable it's more of an issue of what's going to make our contributors happy and still be sustainable. You can always make people happy by giving them a raise later .. it's when a business start out too generous and has to make temporary cutbacks later that gets people steaming.

Yes, the entire subscription issue is an annoying hurdle. To be perfectly blunt, the sub model should have never been created in the first place. Obviously, not the creation of anyone who has ever worked a day as a professional photographer. Too late now .. but we will not encourage them. Not only does the sub model insult the photographer .. it rips off the buyer, who typically doesn't max their downloads due to fluctuating workloads and the fact that 2 days of the week they're not even in the office. The only ones who benefit are the agencies who offer them ... get paid for a sale without delivering a product or paying royalties on the sale. I know we could profit a lot more by offering them but the fact that I shoot for a living and my personal ethics won't allow it.

Honestly, those who get in from the beginning are going to have the advantage. Do buyers need that image of an isolated tomato? Most definitely and we want to make that available for them. Are we going to continue accepting thousands of isolated tomatoes for the next decade? Nope.
We're going to bring in new photographers in phases. The ones now are going to have a lot more flexibility in what they upload than those who join a year from now.

No, we don't expect a problem with the 40 bazillion images issue anytime in the near future. LOL .. I've sat down with designers and content providers and a common complaint is that they can't find what they're looking for quickly because there's simply too much crap to wade through. Back to that isolated tomato .. how long does it take to find the image you want for a project when you have to sit there browsing though page after page after page of tomatoes that all pretty much look identical. We don't want to offer designers 50,000 images of tomatoes to choose from. We want them to search tomato and be given a decently sized yet diverse selection of quality tomato shots that they can quickly choose from and get back to work on their project. The designer is happy because we've taken away their frustration and the companies CFO is happy because their staff isn't wasting man hours.

I don't want to use Stockfresh as an example because I have nothing to do with them and I don't wish to speak negatively about any of the agencies for that matter. However, I think a great example to get my point across is simply using photography studios in general. For the last decade my wife & I have owned a portrait studio in our metro area. I don't even bother counting the competing studios in this city anymore .. there are literally thousands of them here within a 30 mile radius who charge a fraction of what we do ... we know people who have had their all day wedding shot for 50 bucks. However, we still shoot more clients every year than 99% of them and commonly have portrait clients drive up to 2 1/2 hours to get here. My point being it is possible to operate successfully without even trying to compete with everybody. One of the things that made our studio one of the top studios in the region was not entirely our skilled experience but the human experience we created for our clients .. that's something we want to bring to PIXYLOO.

and thanks for your detailed feedback .. it's greatly appreciated.

Quote from: dirkr on November 21, 2014, 12:15
Overall that sounds pretty good.
One remark though: Minimum resolution of 8.6 MP excludes a lot of very usable content. I have been shooting several years with a (8.2 MP) Canon 30d, so all that content would not be usable at your site.
Other than that: Are you looking for any special content or special look? Or will you be accepting a broad spectrum of content?

That was decided because it comes out to an 8x12 at 300 dpi which allows for a perfect magazine cover with a 1/2 safety margin .. and I can't count how many times I've been asked to resend a client a file because they didn't think they could use an image if it wasn't just a hair bigger. You would think that all art directors could resize an image faster than sending an email request. 
As for your 8.2MP images .. simply run them through a batch image process in Photoshop or export them out of Lightroom at 3600. Provided the images were sharp to begin with, that small increase is honestly not going to hurt the quality.

We do not want to limit the entire collection to a certain look or just the current trend. We're interested in a broad range of images. For example .. fades & sun flares are a fad now and we'll accept them but we also want images that will be popular 5 - 10 years down the road.

Quote from: Ranker on November 21, 2014, 12:06
Pixy Loo? Are you taking the piss ? (pun intended  )

The name might frown some brows in the UK

LOL .. nicely played. I actually hadn't thought about that possibility in the UK but now that you've brought it up .. I love it! ... those designers won't easily forget us and be sitting around saying ... what was that site called .. PIXY something. 

I would say we planned it but in truth .. we created a list of around 2000 potential names and only 3 of them actually had a .COM available. LOL

I don't agree with it but that's what happens when millions of people don't care about the images they take .. somebody thinks of a way to take advantage of you for a quick buck ... ok a lot of quick bucks. I'm sure that an insane number of people have absolutely no clue that their images will be sold this way because they're just hobbyists. Just as you can bet at some point there was an executive who said ... we can do this and an insane number of people will never even have a clue we're doing it !!! I wonder what kind of raise that person got? 

ohhhh here it is .. the dreaded moment when you first announce something new Before I do though - I'd like to give out a special thank you to Sean Locke, Jo Ann Snover, Leaf & ShadySue. We used a lot of feedback from photographers & buyers and those of you here on MSG that I talked to have been a big help. Your thoughts were greatly appreciated and we hope to hear more from you.

Ok I'm going to give the super fast breakdown based on the common concerns and then everybody can feel free to drill me with any questions. First off, I'd like to introduce PIXYLOO

Royalties :: 40% for non-exclusivity. There will also be an exclusive option with higher royalties & benefits but that's being added further down the road.

Subscriptions :: We do not support the industries sub model strategy. We will offer two RF base options ... web $10 / print $25 .. Extended Add-ons range from $75-$500 ... Image Dimension also plays no role in pricing therefore the minimum image size accepted is 8.6MP (3200x2400px).

Ease of Uploading :: Right now it's super easy. Make sure that you have IPTC data filled out & send us the batches. We will take care of the rest for you.

Signing Up :: It's by invite only. You will need to apply for consideration.

Review Times :: Let's face it, review times have been an on-going complaint from contributors on all the agencies for the last 14 years. I'm not going to BS anyone by saying how fast PIXYLOO review times will be. In fact, we're going to "intentionally" take longer because we are not moving forward with the standard review system that has been used by most of the micro agencies. We want to focus more on quality of service and less on how fast we can reach 40 bazillion images online.

Marketing :: I'm not going into detail about our marketing plan but it does involve us initially giving away all of our profits upfront to buyers for them to generate sales on your images. We will also be marketing directly to a pre-existing list of buyers when we exit the pre-launch phase. PIXYLOO is a new stock agency but there's several decades of experience behind it.

Just a quick touch on some other things to give you an idea of where we're going .. we plan on focusing a lot on community & education through the blog & youtube. We will also be putting effort into features (beyond a typical forum) that encourages communication between buyers & sellers on a local level. If a buyer in your area is looking to contract a job out to a local artist, we want to make that process as easy as possible and where you can profit 100% from the opportunity. That's just one way we want to help our contributors grow their businesses beyond selling stock should they choose to. There's also the PIXYLOO Freedom of Speech policy which states that when the forums go live anyone who alters a contributors negative comment about PIXYLOO to read "comment removed by admin" will be severely beaten about the head. I absolutely cannot stand seeing agencies do that .. if we're called out publicly on a mistake - you're going to see us publicly take responsibility and make things right. We're not going to play that game of censoring comments and deleting threads that don't praise our actions. Honesty & Integrity is very important to our business model. We have a lot of ideas and a solid foundation to build them on.

Ok, questions? Feedback? Go take a peek at PIXYLOO and tell us what you think. We are always open to ideas. Keep in mind that we are in pre-launch and not currently marketing to buyers. So, you might come across a bug or two. If you want to be in our very first round of contributors, make sure to visit the Call to Artists.

A bigger city ... with less photographers!

I live in Kansas City with a population of over 2 million but we also seem to have WAY more photographers than in other city I've traveled to. I've completely stopped using some of my most favorite portrait locations simply because too many photographers found out about them. 5 years ago I could take a client to the West Bottoms and shoot for 3 hours and we might not see a single person on the streets - it was almost creepy. Go there now on a warm day and you're guaranteed to see at least 15 different photographers within a few minutes, all shooting portrait & fashion clients. The last time we shot there my wife & I counted off maybe 30-40 portrait photographers in a 3 block radius. You would have had to wait in line just to shoot your client sitting on a fire escape. We drove around for about 5 minutes and left. More & more areas here in KC are getting that way too because there's just too many photographers.

Some of the other metros I shot in this summer like Denver, Colorado Springs, Omaha, Wichita, Des Moines & St Louis .. I never really saw any other photographers aside from some nature photographers in Colorado. We seriously didn't want to come back to KC after shooting those assignments. After our kids are out of high school in a few more years we're probably relocating to another metro simply for photography reasons.

personal safety should always come first .. unless the injury costs less than the equipment 

no desire to switch to mirrorless .. but I wouldn't mind adding one to my gear as a goto system that I could quickly grab on the way out the door when shooting is not a priority. I prefer to have a bigger/heavier camera but in many cases it gets left at home or the studio because it's not convenient to bring.