Hi people,

as promised, I have worked on making sure the photographers get a link to their portfolio (for now only ShutterStock). It's really basic and it's probably going to change a bit, but basically this is the idea:

The 'endpoint' for a term:
https://pixxionary.com/term/35347/teacher

An overview of all the photographers of whom the stock images have been used:
https://pixxionary.com/contributors

If you can't see either of these you probably need to switch to 'English' on top of the page. Also note that I have only just listed a few names; this is going to change of course. It's a lot of (extra) work but I would like to make sure in the end everybody is listed properly.

As I said in previous posts I would like to give back to the community and this is how I can somehow contribute. I think you guys need more recognition for the work that you do, and that you are way too undervalued.

I'll be back ;-)

Stockpiling is downloading images you don't use right away to save them for later

I have not heard of this term, but this is also not my intention. I plan to just keep adding images on a daily basis to the platform.

The other thing to note is that you'd have to take 8 months to download 6k images with a 750-per-month subscription - you can't pay extra to download more images right away (at subscription prices)

Actually 'only' 750 downloads per month is a good thing. It's a lot to process for just one person, so I'm pretty ok with 8 months to get to 6K

Quote from: mindstorm on June 12, 2019, 15:40

This is why I have not piped in before now. You can get them SO CHEAP from the agencies that I figured you were trying to game the system and really get from us free.

Same here.

Gavin, maybe this new-to-you information will help you understand why so many folks here appear (and are!) a bit hostile to the "great new ideas" that both stock agencies and individuals routinely offer us. Once burned, twice or thrice wary.

Yes, I do understand it better now. But really, I was genuinely trying to find a structure that everyone would feel comfortable with.

Quote from: gavin on June 12, 2019, 15:04

Quote from: dirkr on June 12, 2019, 14:29

Quote from: gavin on June 12, 2019, 11:28

"You can easily get paid images for as low as 0.27 per image on a subscription plan which you don't even want to pay for."
If it was a one time fee I would gladly pay up. But this is per month!

No, it's not.
With each of the big agencies (e.g. Shutterstock or Adobe Stock) subscription plans you pay monthly for your subscription as long as the plan runs.
You can buy only one month, so only one payment. Or you can buy a yearly plan, so 12 monthly payments.
With each of these plans you can download a given number of images per month. Those images come with an RF license, so you can use them permanently without further payments.
What Shutterstock shows me right now on their homepage (here in Germany, prices may differ for different locations) is e.g. a yearly plan for 750 images per month for �159 per month.
You get 9000 images for less then �2000.

Ok, I'll probably sound very dumb but I find their pricing scheme confusing. So if I understand correctly it means that if I for instance decide to sign up for a 750 images monthly plan and only subscribe for 1 month, I can download 750 images and I can keep using them after that? To be honest I thought it meant that you have access to those 750 images for $159, but to keep access you need to pay the fee each month 

You can keep on using them. You only pay as long as you want to keep on downloading (new) images.
Yes, it's true. We as photographers get some cents for an RF license that entitles the buyer to use the image forever. That's what the market today is.

Dirkr, thank you for making me look really stupid!

I was under the impression that if I needed 6000 images I would need a monthly subscription of 8 x $159 (or 1 x $1272), and that I would need to renew the subscription each month to keep access to the images. Now that I write it down like this, this doesn't sound logical, at all. But that's how I interpreted it. I also must admit that apparently I did not fully understand what 'royalty free' exactly means. I do now.

Part of the confusion came from that I somehow found it hard to believe that buying images could be that cheap. The last time I needed a stock image (a really long time ago) I believe we paid something like $350 or similar, now it's only $0,27!! I think you guys deserve way more than that

Quote from: gavin on June 12, 2019, 09:40

Quote from: Clair Voyant on June 12, 2019, 09:26

OP... you can count me out. Unforunately I do this for a living and need to turn a profit. Use creative commons if you want free. Seriously, the royalties we already get are pathetic enough, let alone running around sourcing and researching for you for a few pennies. Not to be a joykill or anything, but photos cost money to produce.

Hi Clair, thank you for your reply!

I fail to see where I said anything about 'running around sourcing and researching for me'. The way I see it, is that you guys all have content portfolios that may or may not contain material that can be used on the site. Participating does not mean anything more than letting me know where to find your material so I can look through it to see if there's content that I can use, and if so I would like to pay you a fair fee for it. What a fair fee is, is something I'm trying to find out by asking you all what you consider a fair fee.

I don't want anyone to 'work for me' for peanuts and I'm certainly not asking for that. But if that's how my post is being perceived I may need to formulate it differently then.

Let's presume I send you a link to my portfolio... then you find 10 images you want for lets say $2.50. Now i have to go and find those images on approximately 10 external hard drives and search (sourcing and researching) for those images from thousands of images = time, lots of time. I am very organized with my content, but it's simply not worth my time to search for $25.00. You can easily get paid images for as low as 0.27 per image on a subscription plan which you don't even want to pay for. 

Go creative commons if you want free, otherwise you are asking a lot from photographers.

"You can easily get paid images for as low as 0.27 per image on a subscription plan which you don't even want to pay for."
If it was a one time fee I would gladly pay up. But this is per month!

"Go creative commons if you want free, otherwise you are asking a lot from photographers."
I never asked for free stuff and I'm not asking for anything else from photographers than their feedback. I'm trying to learn and gain insight into your world. If feedback tells me the plan I have is not feasible, and I need to let it go, I will. But for that I need info, that's all.

OP... you can count me out. Unforunately I do this for a living and need to turn a profit. Use creative commons if you want free. Seriously, the royalties we already get are pathetic enough, let alone running around sourcing and researching for you for a few pennies. Not to be a joykill or anything, but photos cost money to produce.

Hi Clair, thank you for your reply!

I fail to see where I said anything about 'running around sourcing and researching for me'. The way I see it, is that you guys all have content portfolios that may or may not contain material that can be used on the site. Participating does not mean anything more than letting me know where to find your material so I can look through it to see if there's content that I can use, and if so I would like to pay you a fair fee for it. What a fair fee is, is something I'm trying to find out by asking you all what you consider a fair fee.

I don't want anyone to 'work for me' for peanuts and I'm certainly not asking for that. But if that's how my post is being perceived I may need to formulate it differently then.

Nice project, best to you and your success.

As I see the question, you are looking for illustrations and probably items and subjects, not the kind of art or concept images that most of us are producing already, I'd say $5 an image, for someone to create a shot for you, is fair to both. There aren't many illustrative one item images on the stock sites, that would be visual dictionary kind of material?

I don't know why a Shutterstock subscription wouldn't work for you, by the month. You could also come here and say what you are looking for and we could upload. Sure I'm only getting a sub sale, but you would have any of us interested, creating for what you need. Those who want to donate would also create and upload, make it entertaining, MSG competition.

And by all means, links to an artists portfolio or website as a payment would be attractive.

Hi Uncle Pete, thanks for your reply!

A monthly ShutterStock subscription would be just too expensive. Not sure what the actual cost would be but I reckon at least 1000-2000. For a website that is not generating any income, and no outlook on income in the near future it's just impossible (for me) to commit to a monthly recurring fee that high.

"There aren't many illustrative one item images on the stock sites, that would be visual dictionary kind of material?"
I disagree, there *are* a lot of single item images on stock sites. But I'm actually not looking for (isolated), single object images anymore because, while they look nice on a website with a white background, they provide little to no context. I prefer images where the context tells you more about for instance the size of something, or usage.

"And by all means, links to an artists portfolio or website as a payment would be attractive."
Best case scenario, Pixxionary will be seen by many eyes in the world (I like to dream big ;-)) so I think it's useful for photographers to have their link on the image page. But is this amongst photographers generally seen as an attractive option? Let's say we opt for links to portfolios as payment, and some time later Pixxionary becomes successful and generates income, wouldn't people feel like 'this guy is doing well because I and others submitted our images and all we got was a link to our portfolios'?

Quote from: gavin on June 12, 2019, 02:58

Hi Anyka,

Thank you for your reply! Actually this is the exact thing I was thinking about and I have thought of the following solution:

- photographers that want to offer their images provide me with their info and links to their content at the stock agency website(s)
- when I'm looking for images I go through the content at the agency website and collect whatever I need
- I then send the images to the photographer so he/she can provide me with the actual material
- payment follows

The process could probably be simplified further, but in a nutshell this is the idea. Would something like this work?

PS: Nederlands?

Yes, you're right, that would be the only way to do it.  However, I think that would be against the rules of many stock agencies ?


P.S.:  Ja inderdaad, ik ben Nederlandstalig en woon in Antwerpen

I have no idea how these agreements with agencies work, but (I think) unless a photographer has made an exclusive deal with an agency there would not be any violation of the agreement. I mean, photographers can sell the same images through agency x and y, right? Or for instance they can sell the same images through their own website, right?

Or do agencies penalize photographers for selling content directly to customers? I would think not.

Or do you mean with 'against the rules' this: "when I'm looking for images I go through the content at the agency website and collect whatever I need", because with this I mean that I make an inventory of the images I would like to use. I would not be 'taking' anything literally.

Hi Gavin,

Thanks for the mention and welcome.

I think it's a great idea and cutting out the middlemen is something that we, contributors, can only dream of since we're constantly being taken for a ride with lower and lower royalties (generally speaking).

1. With this scenario in the backdrop, would be great to work with you to further your project.

2. Since the usage is digital and educational...I believe that $1 per image would be fair, assuming the sales are in bulk. For a one-off then $5 is reasonable, as Sean has indicated. I'd be willing to be flexible though and since there is no middle-men, more room to negotiate.

3. Most simple as possible would be welcome. We don't care much for admin as I doubt you do as well. I don't think pay per view is practical either and from looking at my Connect royalties for those, it's too little for us to be interesting (unless you can offer substantially more)

Best of luck with this venture and let's keep in touch!

Alex

Thank you so much Alex! We're definitely staying in touch!

Quote from: gavin on June 11, 2019, 09:52

So what I would to get your honest feedback on:

1) Would you be willing to participate in this platform?

2) What would you consider a fair royalty per used image?

3) What type of licensing would you prefer? I can think of 3 options:
    1: single fee at the start of license
    2: yearly renewal
    3: fee per x amount of views

1. Sure, a sale is a sale.
2. I license web images on my Photoshelter site for $5.  Somewhere around that, or less for bulk.
3. You want RF.  Pay it once and be done.  You don't want to manage payments on that sort of collection.

Thanks for your feedback Sean! Just checked your work, awesome stuff!!

Hi everybody!

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Alexandre Rotenberg (Brasilnut) who directed me to this forum. He suggested I should ask for your feedback, so here goes:

Currently there isn�t an online visual dictionary that is very good, so I aim to (maybe foolishly) change that. I assume that (most of) you are familiar with the concept of a visual dictionary, but in short it allows you to find the name of things you only know what they look like, or vice versa it allows you to find the image of things you only know what they are called.

The initial target audience is schools/students, parents with young children and refugees/immigrants. But basically it�s anyone who wants or needs to learn a language, or just curious people, like myself, that want to know what stuff is called.

One of the key aspects of a visual dictionary, you guessed it, is images. Without images the whole concept is silly. So in order to make this platform a reality I need a few thousand of them. Any respectable paper visual dictionary has at least 6000 images, so that is sort of my reference. I started searching for images on free stock sites, and while there is a lot of content available, I found there�s also a lot I can�t find. For what I could not find on free stock sites I turned to Google images. But just grabbing images from Google is a can of worms and could potentially be harmful in terms of copyrighted content. The last thing I want is to get sued for unauthorized usage of copyrighted material, so that is not an option. There are currently images on the platform that I will need to, and going to replace before I run into any legal problems.

I could try to shoot the images I need myself, but that is undoable if I want to launch anything remotely useful this century. Also I would essentially be reinventing the wheel because the image I�m looking for already exists. That leaves only one realistic option, and that is using paid stock images. Within this option, I see 2 possible scenarios:

1) Buy images from a stock site
I looked into several plans offered by different stock sites, but nothing really covers my specific use case. Furthermore, the cost for any customized plan would be crazy high and would not be an option for a website that does not generate any income whatsoever (yet). There would be however a huge pool of material and I think I could cover every term/expression with this material.

2) Buy images directly from stock photographers
This sounds the most appealing because this would eliminate the stock site middleman. Also, I gathered that royalties from these sites are not that great, and I *may* be able to give a better price per used image. There is however a huge �but�. Photographers may not want to deal with any hassle of the whole administration process. I haven�t figured out yet how to create a process that is smooth and easy, and I�m pretty sure I can tackle that, but I think that may be a big hurdle.


So what I would to get your honest feedback on:

1) Would you be willing to participate in this platform?

2) What would you consider a fair royalty per used image?

3) What type of licensing would you prefer? I can think of 3 options:
    1: single fee at the start of license
    2: yearly renewal
    3: fee per x amount of views

Ultimately I would like to find a pricing/licensing structure that photographers are comfortable with, and make this platform a reality. I have already started working on it and you can find it at https://pixxionary.com/nl (I'm directing to the Dutch version because it's a bit more complete, but you can switch to English on top of the page).

Looking forward to feedback!