Need advice on professional photography website project

[bertlef]

Hello everyone.

I am a programmer/webmaster and I am currently working on a project to set up a professional photography website, I am talking something very professional and easy to use for buyers like comstock or istockphoto, where you can sell royalty free images but also promote your self as a professional.

The think is that the interest of the project is not to directly profit from image sells, the photographer would be in charge of making the final sell, keeping 100% of the income, the project would make a profit in other ways (but not in publicity or subscriptions, it would be free to use)

What I would like to know is if this sounds good to you as a photographer? or if it doesn't seem to be of any help?

Any comments would be very appreciated.

Regards,

Felipe

[QT Luong]

Remember this is the large format photography forum. You will find that few people who shoot large format or equivalent will have any interest in anything that's even remotely royalty-free.

[bertlef]

Thanks for your response, that is actually part of my question, but I am not good at asking.

The project would allow you to expose your self as a photographer, link to your website and promote your other work, not-royalty free (not sure how to call it).

[Gordon Moat]

Getty Images probably has the easiest to use Stock Photography website out there. You might also want to look into iPNStock, Jupiter Images, and Corbis. All of them have lightbox features, are fairly user friendly, and have good search features. The downside of starting a stock imaging company is that your search feature will not have many images nor keywords from which to gather results. At the low end, you might investigate Alamy.

More photographer friendly websites include Workbook, BlackBook, and AltPic, though there are some industry specific sites like Le Book, Lürzer's Showcase, et al. While not necessarily stock oriented, they sometimes do well to market professional photographers.

Royalty Free is a turd in a punch bowl; there is damn little money to be made for the effort, and what revenue exists does little to help the majority of photographers involved in this (check recent PDN industry surveys on professional photographers, and more recently on the state of the stock imaging industry). If you really want to cater to large format photographers, and create something unique to offer to potential buyers, then set it up as Rights Managed. A company you might find good as a model for doing this would be Panoramic Images.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography

P.S. - I personally have zero interest in stock photography.

[bertlef]

Gordon Moat thanks a lot for your comments, they are very accurate and are precisely what I am looking for. Your are right about the little money in stock photo that is way I thought it would be better not to charge any fee if the images where sold in this way.

I will look into the websites you mentioned and will work on the Rights Managed approach more, I guess that there still could be photographers interested in the stock approach, but that would be up to them.

If anyone has any ideas of what would be good I'd love to hear them, anything is possible, and I would like to do something useful.

Regards.

[Jon Denker]

I would like to find out more, the idea is compelling.

[bertlef]

I am glad, what I will do is set up a demo and give you the link, I guess that way is easier to explain.

I hope to have this within a couple of days.