Hi all, I hope this isn't inappropriate but I thought this might be of use to a few people. I work for a web design company that have created a new hosted stock library solution.
A few details you may find interesting...

� Extremely easy to use, both for you and your customers
� Sell original, medium & small image files
� Payments go direct to your PayPal account, we do not take a cut of the payments!
� You prices of course
� Sell in your preferred currency
� Batch upload with IPTC, XMP integration
� Your own branding, content, watermark, styling
� Fully hosted - managed using just your browser
� Use your own web address
� Use your own Google Analytics code
� No contract tie-ins!!

Free 100 image tier, check the site for more, up to date details.
http://www.avidimages.com/

Demo:
http://jerryspictures.avidimages.com/

Just out of curiosity is it related to Avid, the guys who make the (awesome) film editing software and also own Digidesign?

What does it cost? No pricing on the site.

they do now. "low monthly cost of only U$35", that's more than U$400 per year.

Quote from: FD-regular on July 14, 2010, 16:05

What does it cost? No pricing on the site.

they do now. "low monthly cost of only U$35", that's more than U$400 per year.

Hahahahahaha. The guy has a sense of humor. Low monthly cost.  
Still born. I expected him to pay 400$ to upload.

$30 a month ! no thanks

Thanks for your feedback guys,
we had a little update after that - check it out see what you think
www.avidimages.net

QR8Design: Please check this forum. There is a very similar alternative to yours, basically offering exactly the same functionality for the cost of USD 0,00 plus a small percentage of 12% of all sales!

That's more or less a fair bargain..  I'm sorry to say that yours is simply too expensive!

"for just $30 a month, your own stock library has never made so much sense"

No thanks. It's not a stock selling site at all. It's a paid hoster, like Photoshelter. Misleading post...

You are right, i have updated the original post - hopefully makes more sense now
Thanks!

The site design looks nice. The "info" page was a little light on details. Image formats available (tiffs, vectors, etc.), using your own url, IPTC friendly, and is there a size limit for those 5000 images were just a few questions I had.

Hi cthoman,
Thank you for your interest

Yes the info page is fresh off the press, it will be expanded and clarified more with time.
There are only raster formats currently supported in the most popular formats (jpeg, png, tiff and so on, everyone so far just uses jpegs), they are all converted to JPEGs on upload.
Yes you can use your own URL.
Yes our batch upload process fully supports IPTC meta-data
Biggest image you can upload is 4000x4000 pixels as per the popular SLR output, anything bigger is scaled to fit.

Any other questions please feel free to ask!

There are only raster formats currently supported in the most popular formats (jpeg, png, tiff and so on, everyone so far just uses jpegs)

Thanks for the quick response. I'm an Illustrator, so no vectors is a deal breaker for me. But, I bookmarked you for future reference.

It seems that you could run a botique agency out of this setup - would you say you are competing against the agency-in-a-box scripts?

Hosting of the script in a setup that gets significant traffic will cost $30 + a ton of headaches.

Are there traffic limits to this setup? Is it restricted to a "person" and not an "agency"?

Are there allowances to let other people, beyond the main user, upload?

Thanks...

Hi ppdd,
Yes you can run an agency although its not tailored for that specific use, there are no limits on traffic or anything else beyond image storage.
The system only has one user - the owner, but it would be very easy to extend this to accommodate other authors with an upload facility and even automate the monthly payments to your authors.
If there is enough interest in having this kind of system im sure we can accommodate.
Thank you for your interest!

Hi ppdd,
Yes you can run an agency although its not tailored for that specific use, there are no limits on traffic or anything else beyond image storage.
The system only has one user - the owner, but it would be very easy to extend this to accommodate other authors with an upload facility and even automate the monthly payments to your authors.
If there is enough interest in having this kind of system im sure we can accommodate.
Thank you for your interest!

I see potential with this as an option - being able to truly "white label" it would be a differentiator, and perhaps would be a motivator to let you introduce a slightly higher pricing tier. I think Photoshelter's version of this concept is $250/month, which puts it out of most ranges. But for boutique agency, etc, more like $50/monthly is easier to swing (vs. hosting yourself).

I would say you need SOME bandwidth limit, just because (as I've found out), there's always a limit. "Unlimited" means "until you crash our servers and we kick you off"  

Hello again,
We have been hard at work polishing and adding features to this system, i thought i would post it here as the discussion from this forum is great.

You now have a choice of plans starting from $15/month (please see website for prices).
Choice of hosting region: US, Asia, Europe - so your customres get the fastest possible load times.

And most importantly you can try it out FREE for 7 days and if you are not happy, just cancel it before the trial runs out - you wont spend any money.

Check http://www.avidimages.net/ for more details,
If you have any questions I would be more than happy to answer.
Val

...and I have to pay you to upload NO THANKS!...let me know when it changes the other way around...

Its not a stock library like iStock, you get your own store, you set the prices and you get paid 100% of the sales. You pay us for storage, bandwidth, processing power and maintaining the software. Sign up for a day, have a play around, see how you like it and then cancel it - there is nothing to lose.

Well we have been working hard lately, many upgrades to the system:

Firstly we moved to avidimages.com (.net still works)
Rebuilt our upload system, if your images are IPTC or XMP tagged - it will import these for you, much easier to keyword stuff in Bridge for example than on the web!
Many technical improvements, such as caching for rapid loading of pages and SEO urls, thumbnail navigation on image pages, widgets you can paste on blogs and many, many more.
Completely rebuilt search system, best available technology, needless to say it is fast and accurate

We also let people search all our client's websites from the main avidimages.com site -
our vision is that with time people will turn up and be able to search avidimages like they do iStock (or any other traditional stock library)
but instead of then buying the images from iStock they will be able to buy images direct from the actual clients! In short a co-operative stock library.
Its a chicken and egg situation as to attract traffic to the coop we need people to add images for visitors to browse and buy.
So with that in mind we have added a free tier to our pricing, you can host a small library of 100 images for free, forever.

Once we have a good user base our plan is to change the main site (avidimages.com) to be more of a search destination for image buyers rather than for image sellers.
I would love to hear people's thoughts on the idea or any feedback they might have,
as always i am available here to answer any questions you might have.

is this like the clustershot model?

We bring in the buyers?
or
do you guys market it and bring in the buyers?

Quote from: m@m on October 29, 2010, 10:05

...and I have to pay you to upload NO THANKS!...let me know when it changes the other way around...

Its not a stock library like iStock, you get your own store, you set the prices and you get paid 100% of the sales. You pay us for storage, bandwidth, processing power and maintaining the software. Sign up for a day, have a play around, see how you like it and then cancel it - there is nothing to lose.

sorry, but what about licensing? I can't find any RF agreement, terms & conditions for buying images and permitted usage. Which agreement buyers are going to accept before downloading a picture?
Besides, I signed up out of curiosity and I had to fill just a few fields....no address, country, no ID card, basically you will never know who I am!! Now, does this apply to buyers as well? There are frauds going on everyday on big agencies that I would be very concerned to sell my photos through a website that collects no data from people. Since you are not acting as a traditional agency, I wonder what happens in case a buyer misuse our images?? 

+ Bookmark
A nice option! But only offering paypal is a nogo for me ...

With time we are planing to add more payment options, what would you like to see as a payment gateway?
The closest other payment system in terms of providing the service we require is Google Checkout, trouble is they do not support subscriptions.

I like the idea, but with no vector upload I'm not signing up right away. Any plans to implement this in the future?

Quote from: ThomasAmby on February 15, 2011, 07:47

I like the idea, but with no vector upload I'm not signing up right away. Any plans to implement this in the future?

Yes actually, we are not far.
Internally the system already has support for importing eps, ai and pdf files - but it will try and sell these out at 3 raster sizes at the moment rather than the original vector.

Very cool Looking forward to trying it

Quote from: QR8Design on February 15, 2011, 07:25

Each store has its own licensing agreement, we provide the starting point which each store owner can change or replace. That is the agreement buyers accept as the transaction is between them and the store owner direct - we just provide the software to do so.

Unfortunately I expect that buyers will get really confused by this approach.

The idea behind your site is not bad, but having a common framework for licensing (either RF or RM) saves time to people. What if a buyer is looking only for RF images? this very basic search is not possible on your website.
And even if he finds a bunch of RF images, then he should read all terms&conditions on each store because each artist may have changed the agreement and restrict some usages.
For instance, I've seen an image of a laptop computer with the windows logo on it. There is no mention if it's RM or RF. The title on the page states "royalty free image", but this is really confusing since there is no info about release!

Sorry to say it, but I feel that if something is not clear and easy to understand, people will shop elsewhere.

It is an RF system, there is no use model or exclusivity given on purchase and our starting point for the license agreement is catered for such.
We are yet to see anyone change the license agreement beyond adding their name in.
Since this is a collection of user's own sites connected by a common search system - its not realistic to make everyone use prescribed license agreement to their buyers,
at that point it would cease to be of value to people looking to do their own thing and therefore kill the revenue stream for us.
Since we take no cut in the sales, that kind of business model would not work out.

Yes, thats what i was thinking also. One lic aggrement or two, one rm and one rf, standard. this would keep the buyer confusion to a min.

Thanks or answering my questions above.
I belive you said that you will market it iwith the search engin of google? im not to clear on the responce.

one more question: if i bring a buyer to my site and they then search for "...cow smoking a cigar, will results be for just my images of for the entire site?

We will market the site to image buyers, once we get enough stock.
The search engine reference was about our site (letting visitors search though images on avidimages) rather than any particular internet search engine.
Any search on your site is through your images only, its very much your own store!

Thanks again for the answers!

Looking foward to giving the free trial a shot for right now.

I like having my foot in the door in as many interesting outlets as possible.

Wishing you/us great sucess,
Nick

Thanks Nick!

Ive been trying out and playing around with the free site and it it looks good so far and very easy to navigate. Are we able to change the banner/header? i tried uploading my own banner (940 wide), but it doesn't seem to work.

Very impressed...easy to set up. I've already seen my images on the home page. I will wait to see how sales go before upgrading. Very promising...thanks

I've just finished uploading my library of niche illustrations in my own free site at avidimages. I have also changed it to point to my own domain name. The process is just so easy and the layout is clean and simple yet so professional.

Comments have been so positive that I'm thinking of trying it too!

I would like to have RM license option.

I see people have domains like johndoe.avidimages.com, but is it possible to have just johndoe.com?

I'm having a real problem, Mac, Firefox. It doesn't show any status bar when uploading, so I ignored that, and found I'd uploaded an image. Now I've uploaded 2 images, but can only see one, even though it says 2 in 'Overview' there's only one in 'gallery', in spite of deleting cookies and refreshing. This is going to make it very slooooow! Camino is even worse - I guess I'll have to try Safari or (aaargh!) Internet Explorer.

Nope, both Safari and Explorer tell me the same thing - 2 in overview, 1 in gallery

OK, solved that! Click on your existing image and the other one magically appears! - it's beyond me   Weird

Im not sure whats happening there, never experienced that. I will send you an email when i get back to office on monday.

anyone prefer to have RM license option? if i need to direct seller to buy from me through this website, I would like to put unique portfolio there, and I would like to sell as RM for some images instead of images that can get in other websites as subs download.

Quote from: mtkang on February 26, 2011, 00:19

I would like to have RM license option.

I will need to talk to my partner when i see him on monday, but as i remember we decided that RM would be too complex to add - we are trying to make a system that does RF and does it well, which makes it very easy to sell images as well as buy them. I will see if my partner has a more detailed explanation.

stockusagi.com

done setup my page, easy and thumps up on the direct paypal payment. yet still alot of improvement need to be done; vector file, default centralize search engine, EL, etc.

100 upload cap is so 'bottleneck' my portfolio exposure tho ^,^. maybe a good sale then ill consider the subscription plan.