In the Field: Photo Blog by Richard Wong

Photography field reports by Richard Wong. Richard’s work has been published in magazines, books, advertising, and offers fine art prints of his work. Images may be licensed as rights-managed stock photos by contacting Richard directly at Richard@rwongphoto.com or (626) 422-6151. California stock photography, fine art prints, photo blog: www.rwongphoto.com

PhotoShelter Part III: What Else is Out There?

Posted on | June 9, 2007 | 7 Comments

Right now I really want to be at Huntington Beach to see the traveling action photo exhibit on the beach tonight and photograph the pier but I need to get the rest of my car repaired on Monday before going anywhere. This fuel injection system is clogged up and caused some electronics in my car to go bad when I was driving home from La Jolla so that cost about $350 the fix last week. But the root of the problem is the fuel injection which costs about $170 to clean. So I will have that done on Monday. When things go well you plan things like a lengthy camping trip up the California coast. But then the longer you wait to go, things like this happen and eventually your budget is sucked down the drain with it.

Okay now back to real purpose of this post. I have been comparing the features I have with PhotoShelter versus what Digital Railroad offers v.s. installing Lightbox Photo software on my website. At this time, PhotoShelter offers more of what I want than the others but it is not perfect either. I’ve emailed several suggestions to Allen Murabayashi over at PhotoShelter and they seem to genuinely take to heart what photographers tell them. A few of the things they are already trying to implement. Customer service so far is an A+ in my experience.

So here are what I have observed as the pluses and minuses to the three different services.

PhotoShelter:

Positives –

1. Customization is entirely up to you. If you know html or css then you can take their template scripts and design your archive in anyway that pleases you. If you don’t want to mess too much with it then their default template is sufficient too. I think most people who sign up for the standard service however probably already have a regular website and want their archive to compliment the look of their website.

2. Easy to manage files and create galleries. Upon uploading your files, your photos and galleries can be priced and up within minutes.

3. Considerably less expensive than Digital Railroad and you get more for your money.

4. If you have a customized archive site, then you don’t have to link back to PhotoShelter’s main site thus not drawing customers away from your main website business.

5. Global search archive on PhotoShelter’s main site. This is essentially the same as DRR’s much-hyped Marketplace. I don’t know which came out first but that doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing.

6. Big name photographers. Photogs like Sports Illustrated photographer, Bill Frakes are touted heavily by the company. The benefit to having name photographers is that it could theoretically attract their buyers to PhotoShelter. However I think the intended benefit to snatching up famous talent is to attract more photographers to the service. I mean it’s fair. That is their business model and they provide what we need.

7. Automated Rights-Managed stock photo sales with FotoQuote. Assuming you have high resolution files uploaded then you can mark them as Rights-Managed and let FotoQuote come up with the pricing. I think you can assign a percentage to their default quotes and come up with your own pricing points that way but I haven’t looked into it yet. You can also take payments for self-fulfilled product orders or automated print delivery. If photographers can get a big percentage of their sales by doing things automatically then it creates more time for them to do things like shooting pictures! :-)

I’ll also let you in on a secret – if you automate your print sales & delivery by using PhotoShelter’s lab then the profit margin is significantly higher than using your own pro labs. I don’t plan on selling anything larger than 8×12 through that service though because for larger prints, quality control becomes increasingly vital.

8. Remote archival storage. This was the initial selling point for PS and DRR. You can upload your originals to be safely stored on the service’s multiple remote storage locations and have access to your files from anywhere in the world.

9? My daily website traffic has more than doubled over the past few days since I have been incorporating the archive onto my site. Is that coinciding with the new month or does having 1,700 images on PhotoShelter bring in more traffic to my site? My site stats aren’t showing conclusive evidence for either theory but I’m not complaining. There’s only one way to find out. I should upload more images! :-)

Negatives -

1. One of the things I suggested to PhotoShelter was to have the photo captions displayed on the search results either by scrolling over the images or captioned below. Currently you have to click on the photo in order to find out what the caption is. DRR already has this down and that is where I got the idea from. I believe PS already has this in the works. Come to think of it, I’m going to suggest this to Alamy as well.

2. Another thing PS is currently working on borrows a bit from Lightbox Photo. Upon suggesting that they should allow for a bigger display page than 25 images per page, they said they were working on allowing the user to define how many images they wanted to be displayed. It will be interesting to see how 5,000 images looks on a single page.

3. The search engine on PhotoShelter.com could be more effective. The default image results are displayed according to date of upload. When you do click on search relevance it’ll usually do a grouping based on photographer. I would much rather see it mixed up. When I typed in Solvang California on the global search archive, the first page was full of Tour de France type of pictures. I don’t consider that to be of any relevance to anyone much less a photo buyer. Since I am the only person on PS with actual Solvang travel pictures then I should be on top and those cycling photos relegated to the bottom of the heap. At the least, our photos should have been evenly distributed amongst the search results. On a positive note, I still have my own archive on my website so you won’t have to see “Tour de Solvang” pictures.

4. Re-occurring costs. I’m on the $29.99 standard plan with 35gb because I wanted my own personalized archive for my regular website. That was my whole reason for signing up in the first place. For $9.99, you don’t get the customizable website and thus could be drawing customers away from your website because it brings you back to the PhotoShelter site. Plus having a PhotoShelter branded archive does nothing for your own business branding. It might seem like a minor strategical tactic but in reality it is huge. A little psychology goes a long way. How else does Nike manage to sell more shoes than anyone else despite having an inferior product?

Digital Railroad:

Positives-

1. Their new Marketplace search is getting a lot of press lately. Like PhotoShelter you can search through all of the photographers archives all at once. Essentially a fee-based version of Alamy. Maybe their expensive costs weeds out bad quality and is a better experience for photo buyers. Plus DRR is hyping up big name buyers who have signed up as buyers. The primary motive is to draw more photographers to the service obviously. I’m keeping my eye on this because I would sign up if photographers reported decent sales from the Marketplace. With one or two sales you could easily make back the annual cost of subscription. Does the hype mean that DRR is heavily marketing towards photo buyers?

2. Similar genre of photography to what I shoot and probably similar to what most people who read my blog do. It is a positive because that should t
heoretically attract the target audience for our photos.

3. Automated sizing of photos for distribution. You upload the high resolution file and the buyer can decide which they need to license and DRR’s system will provide them with the appropriate size. That is especially attractive for the traveling photographer who might not have access to photo editing software or doesn’t have time for production tasks.

4. DRR seems to have a strong association with stock photo trade groups such as Stock Artists Alliance which would appeal to a certain demographic of photogs and buyers. DRR is hyping up the fact they incorporate industry PLUS standards into their system. I tried to read up on the PLUS Packs concept but it was too confusing for me to understand. I’m too lazy to look up exactly what PLUS stands for but it is essentially a notation system for licensing photo rights from what I gather.

5. I did a DRR archive search from a photographer’s website yesterday and it brought back no results from my search. However, it did take me to DRR’s Marketplace and told me that if I license a photo from the Marketplace based off of that photographer’s referral then they get 2% of the proceeds. It would be nice to have more than 2% but at least it fosters a collaborative business environment that benefits photographers as a whole. If I had a DRR account, then I could hypothetically sell a few images from other photographer’s referrals as well. However, I think this would benefit someone like me more than someone like Robert Holmes, who has probably sold images to every publication on the planet. Whatever the case, it definetely makes it convenient for the buyer.

6. Remote archival storage. This was the initial selling point for PS and DRR. You can upload your originals to be safely stored on the service’s multiple remote storage locations and have access to your files from anywhere in the world.

Negatives-

1. Digital Railroad’s customizable photography archives are not much more than slapping on a photographer’s logo at the top and changing the background colors. I don’t know what is possible with their system but I have seen quite a few photographer’s DRR archives and they all look the same more or less. Now compare it to PhotoShelter-based archives. It’s often hard to tell the difference between the photographer’s main website and which portion is hosted by PhotoShelter. PS is literally seamless. Also it allows for some innovative usage and design of your archives. For mine, I took the basic PhotoShelter archive javascripts and integrated them into my basic website html template. Check out PhotoShelter’s main website and they’ll list a few examples of other photographer’s sites. The creative design potential is awesome.

2. Slow search engine. I have tried searches on DRR archives over the past few months and chose to have the maximum of 128 images displayed per page. Well once you do that, the system tends to bog down to a point of near un-usability. It runs fine when you choose to have less images displayed but what is the purpose of allowing a 128 image display if isn’t going to function?

3. Expensive re-occuring costs. Their basic account starts off at $50 – $60 / month. With that you get 20 gb for your archive and inclusion into the Marketplace. First though you have to pay a $100 activation fee to have an account. Ouch. By PhotoShelter comparison. For $9.99, you get 10gb and inclusion into the Marketplace. No activation fee unless you want automated e-commmerce features. Regardless, I’m getting at least twice as much benefits on PhotoShelter for half the cost. The unanswered question though is how or if buyers will use either service.

Lightbox Photo Gallery Software:

Positives-

1. No re-occuring costs. It is like buying MS Windows. You buy the license and you can use it for as long as you wish for no extra costs.

2. Since you are hosting the images and archive, you can monitor the search results. Like anything marketing-related, you can never have too much information at your disposal.

3. Your archive is all under your domain name such as www.rwongphoto.com/asdfadsf.php… not archive.digitalrailroad.net/RichardWong or photoshelter.com/c/richardiamahack URL’s for your archive. While you can mask the photoshelter.com site somewhat through your domain name, you can’t do it entirely. Again, it might not seem like a big deal and maybe it isn’t but it is nice to have people register through your website rather than anything branded by another company.

4. No commission sharing. It’s all you.

5. For the top service plans, you get access to FotoQuote software. But then again, if you have $1,000 to spend on this software you’d probably already have FotoQuote anyway.

Negatives-

1. Since the Lightbox archive is a php-based database system, it is not likely to be crawled by the search engines. What that means is that Lightbox won’t help you in terms of generating more traffic to your website when it comes to search engines. Though if you have an existing client base that already frequents your site, perhaps they’d come back for more business than before. I’m not sure how the archive data infrastructure for PhotoShelter or Digital Railroad works so I can’t say for sure that search engines crawl those archives either. I will look into this though.

2. You host the images = bigger web hosting fees. While there are no re-occuring fees for Lightbox Photo itself. If you are like most photographers who use this software you probably have a lot of images online. Well that adds up in terms of hosting and bandwidth fees even if you have 2,000 low resolution images online. So in all likihood the costs for hosting a big archive would probably rival the costs of subscribing to PhotoShelter or Digital Railroad if not more. As is, I have about 87 megabytes worth of files total on my website out of a 100 mb allotment. My hosting fees aren’t bad, about $35 annually currently. But I only have a few hundred images online. Very low resolution images at that. For a huge website, I don’t know how much it would cost.

3. Not a viable remote archiving option. In my opinion, it wouldn’t be practical to be uploading thousands of high-res images to your web server. The cost would be prohibitive to all but the wealthiest photographers.

4. Not cheap. While it is only a one-time purchasing deal, the bare bones software will cost at least $400. For a fully functional archive though ranges from $700 to $1200.

Overall: There’s benefits to having any of the three services. It is a matter of deciding which fits your priorities. My current priority is to make my website a big fully functional e-commerce site in the hopes of attracting more customers. PhotoShelter just happened to be the most practical way for me to do that at the moment due to the fully customizable archive and lower price.

For another person who might already have an archive or big website and doesn’t need to incorporate anything to their existing website, perhaps Digital Railroad would be the most logical avenue for them to explore. If the DRR Marketplace eventually takes off then that would serve their purposes; an additional revenue stream / side income lunch money.

For long-term financial goals and if you are prepared to handle your own database, then maybe Lightbox Photo Gallery software is your best bet.

In reality, I think the more established stock photographers will probably have a combination of two or three of these services. Someone like me who is still young and building their internet business should just take one step at a time and not bite off more than they can chew. It takes a heck of a lot of work to build a website. I began creating the current version of my website about two years ago and while it has a lot of content that brings in search traffic, I still see a lo
t of room for improvement. Photography is an unusual business in that you often don’t see the benefits of hard work until months later. Having faith in what you are doing and being persistent is the only way to achieve success. There’s no one out there that is going to pat you on the back and give you a promotion for selling some prints and stock photos for tourism brochures and magazine articles. (not that having an employer guarantees you will either, but that is another story.)

Well. Huntington Beach sounds pretty darn appealing right now but most of the shooting hours have been wasted already so there’s always tomorrow. By the way, the photo exhibit will run until June 17th then move onto Portland, Oregon.

Category: Announcements, Opinion
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Comments

7 Responses to “PhotoShelter Part III: What Else is Out There?”

  1. Ron Niebrugge
    June 10th, 2007 @ 5:14 pm

    Very imformative – thanks for posting Richard! Glad to hear your visitor numbers are picking up – I might have to add PS to my mix.

    I thought I would point out a few corrections.

    With DRR, you can have your own domain name. Mira.com is an example of this.

    With Lightbox, you can do automatic downloads, and even RM pricing, but it is a little work to set up the pricing tables – one of thier example sites is this way. For a RF shooter, it is very easy.

  2. Richard
    June 10th, 2007 @ 7:25 pm

    Thanks Ron for the insight, I’ll add the corrections. I wasn’t aware that Mira.com was a drr site. I think they are on PhotoShelter also.

  3. Richard
    June 10th, 2007 @ 7:26 pm

    or was it Myloupe.com. my memory is going bad. haha.

  4. Jim Goldstein
    June 11th, 2007 @ 3:17 pm

    Great write up. The two key component that I don’t see factored in is…
    What traffic is each site pulling in? Is there a particular audience they cater to?

    That could be a huge differentiator making one more of a bargain than another.

    I’ll definitely have to sign up for one of these services in the near future.

  5. Richard
    June 11th, 2007 @ 4:09 pm

    Thanks Jim, yeah I definetely agree. It’s clear that no one really knows the answers to those questions, hence the questions consistently being asked on the photography forums. Hopefully this will give them all incentive to not get complacent.

  6. Mark Pedley
    June 18th, 2007 @ 6:57 am

    Richard,

    We (my partner and I) have used both DRR and PS. We have used DRR for the last 2 years. DRR is by far the best alternative in my view for serving OWN customers. It has functionality that was clearly designed by people who understand the workflow of photographers delivering to clients directly. It also has e-commerce fully integrated. The web design of DRR may be limited, but that is not as important as an integrated, efficient interface to clients that really works well. Also, it can be used as a single photographer presence as apposed to being bunched together in one site.

    At DRR Marketplace, there are professional staff and editors selling to clients. Photographers have no involvement in sales through the Marketplace site. DRR take 20% of fees, just like other portals/agencies. Also, just like other agencies, they set the price (you can apply modifiers to shift the price up or down within certian limits), ensuring no “internal price war”. At PS, you interface yourself to clients. Prices vary considerably! There are no staff (as far as I know, I may be wrong) selling your imagery. This could be a major weakness of PS, especially for those clients who want/prefer a single touchpoint or are buying regularly. Imagine having to deal with dozens of photographers all with different approaches, pricing, speed of delivery, payment modes etc.

    At DRR, there is much more behind the scenes, such as the ability to set up sub-accounts to enable partner photographers to connect to the one archive (PS enables this as well with the Virtual Agency function). We now have two accounts at DRR because it works so well, one for selected editorial imagery my partner sells to clients directly, and another account we have set up to host and manage some partner photographers who asked us to assist in accessing stock agencies. We put them all in DRR Marketplace as well, of course. Time will tell if Marketplace takes off.

    One thing is clear to me. DRR and PS are NOT two versions of the same thing. They are very different animals with different strategies (at the moment at least).

    Another point to consider is the calibre and background of the people behind these ventures. Everyone needs to make their own decision as far as this is concerned.

    Sounds like a DRR sales pitch, I know! However, I have nothing to do with DRR except from a user perspective. I was disapponted with PS as far as fuctionality and approach were concerned. A nice appearance can be deceptive.

    Regards,
    Mark Pedley

  7. Richard
    June 18th, 2007 @ 10:32 am

    Thanks for the testimonial Mark. It is definetely clear that DRR has some big name photo buyers and other industry professionals attached to the brand. At this point I’m still not quite sold on either company yet, though I’m enjoying the added functionality that my website has now. I will likely sign up for the DRR 30 day trial to test it for myself.

    I will add that I like that DRR has automatic re-sizing of images. I’ll have to suggest that to PS.

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