Photoshelter - Opinons/Experiences?

[Ben Chase]

http://psc.photoshelter.com/

Does anyone have any experience with this service? Looks kind of interesting to me...

[IanMazursky]

Hi Ben,

I have been a member for a couple of months. My gallery is http://psc.photoshelter.com/user/ianmazursky

Here are some of my thoughts of the PS site.
The upload process is simple enough but the wait for them to approve the images can be long.
Normally its 3-5 days, sometimes up to 2 weeks. They also have weird image categorizations.
Craetive, News & News + Creative. When they look at your images to see if the want them, they double check the category.
Some images that i considered just creative, they put into the news category. Go figure.

The biggest problem i see with them is that they have very little market penetration. They need allot more advertising to compete with the big boys. They do have an excellent compensation package for photographer. Much better than the penny stock companies.
They also ask for the largest files possible. Up to 100 or so mb. Its not a problem for me since i have a drum scanner. Some may have a problem meeting that requirement.

So far i have not sold anything but ive only been with them for a for a couple of months.
All in all they have a very good service and i would recommend them.

[Ben Chase]

Hi Ben,

The biggest problem i see with them is that they have very little market penetration. They need allot more advertising to compete with the big boys. They do have an excellent compensation package for photographer. Much better than the penny stock companies.
They also ask for the largest files possible. Up to 100 or so mb. Its not a problem for me since i have a drum scanner. Some may have a problem meeting that requirement.

So far i have not sold anything but ive only been with them for a for a couple of months.
All in all they have a very good service and i would recommend them.

Thanks, this is good info. I wasn't sure how much market penetration they have. Most of my scanned MF and LF images are between 150 - 350 MB, so I don't think that will be a problem.

What I am wondering if it might make sense to use this service to offload any e-commerce related activities, and perhaps re-architect my current site minus the e-commerce. I like how they have it set up for usage rights, fotoquote quotes, etc - stuff I'd just assume not mess with myself.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Ben C

[IanMazursky]

Ben,

PS offers a personal collection service where you dont have to have them approve the images.
It is a monthly fee service. I haven't signed up for it but it looks good.
You can set everything and you dont have to worry about it.

-ian

[Ben Chase]

Ben,

PS offers a personal collection service where you dont have to have them approve the images.
It is a monthly fee service. I haven't signed up for it but it looks good.
You can set everything and you dont have to worry about it.

-ian

I must be doing something right, I have a 100% acceptance rate and a high percentage of shots are the "Editor's Choice" (thus far), which doesn't seem to matter in terms of what is actually selling at the site from what I've read.

Hopefully more photographers will decide on rights-managed and less on royalty-free for their pricing.

One thing I did notice while searching around, there are images that floating around on the site that I would not have expected to even be approved.

The last thing Photoshelter needs is mediocre images in their pro stock category - I would be concerned about credibility issues if that gets out of hand. But what do I know - I've never done stock before (nor edited it).

[Ed Richards]

This thread is a year old - any more recent experience?

[brian mcweeney]

Photoshelter stopped the stock sales aspect of the website. Many photographers on this forum do sell their images and prints on a Photoshelter/e-commerce type site. I too would like to hear from people who are paying for this service with Photoshelter

[Frank Petronio]

Photoshelter can go to Hades after that stunt they did closing the stock side. I wasted a couple weeks of work setting it up and a month later they shut it down. I wouldn't trust them with any of my business and they lost all their goodwill.

Check the photoeditor.com website archives for the lowdown.

It was a good idea, as far as being a good back up solution but I'll go elsewhere.

[bsimison]

I shared Frank's opinion of Photoshelter when they shut down late last year. I had just spent a few months organizing, captioning, and uploading images for consideration in the Collection, and had actually made a couple of magazine sales. Then, out of the blue, they announced they were closing the stock sales side of the business to focus on the Personal Archive. Like many photographers that had invested so much of their personal time building up *their* inventory, I felt cheated.

I joined a couple of "Life After Photoshelter" discussion groups to chat with other shooters about where to go next. Many joined Digital Railroad, others went to Alamy, a small group decided to try the microstock thing. Well, Digital Railroad (after very publicly dancing on the Photoshelter Collection's grave) went completely out of business a month or two later. Alamy is still a viable option, and I hear they've relaxed their image size minimums, but they offer no ecommerce backend for your own website. And that's what I was looking for -- shopping cart functionality to sell stock to advertising/editorial clients as well as prints to the public.

After a few months of cooling off and looking around for alternatives, I starting looking at the Photoshelter Personal Archive again. No, they don't have a staff that actively markets your work to clients, but the image management and shopping cart pricing functionality works pretty well. I jumped in back in May 2009 when they were running one of their signup promotions and redesigned my website to take advantage of the functionality. By the end of July, I had made back my initial investment in sales to clients and the public.

I don't care anything about "online backup" -- the whole concept of backing up your work over the internet and trusting someone else to care for the data doesn't make sense to me. I use a pretty thorough system of local, offsite backup which serves me well. But Photoshelter's ecommerce stuff works well, and I'm a fan so far.

Do I think they handled the demise of The Collection poorly? You bet I do. I'm still a little bitter about it. On the other hand, it *did* force me to caption and keyword my work, and cast a hard eye on what is and is not salable, so my efforts weren't completely wasted.