fotoLibrarian

From an article by Victor Keegan in today's Guardian:

The emergence of truly huge banks of photographs has spawned a new industry. Companies such as istockphoto.com in the US and the much smaller fotolibra.com in the UK (not to mention Flickr) are undermining the business models of companies such as Getty Images and Corbis by offering high-quality images on practically any subject at a tiny fraction of the price charged by the big boys.

This may help to explain why Getty Images recently bought istockphoto. Video uploading sites such as YouTube grab most of the headlines, but in many ways they are less sophisticated and much less successful than their stills rivals in generating real communities. Photo sites are also largely free of pirated material. They are the web's true monument to user-generated content.

The full article can be seen online here.

Keegan has put his finger right on the button when he writes that sites such as fotoLibra are generating real communities. The amount of positive feedback we get is mildly embarrassing, and there is a strong sense of being part of that hateful buzzword usually used to describe any disparate bunch of potential voters united by a common grievance, a community. We're breaking down the barriers in the picture buying market in much the same way that Abebooks.com opened up secondhand bookselling to the world. Before Abebooks, secondhand booksellers were either your Sotherans or your Quaritches, or the local mid-terrace shop with a two mile reach. What Abebooks did was herd customers to those local shops. That was disruption.

In August I moaned on this blog that fotoLibra was being being labelled disruptive, but now I recall (it's the first thing to go) that ten years ago I publicised a book by Jean-Marie Dru titled 'Disruption: overturning conventions and shaking up the marketplace'. This is the first significant work on disruption, a topic usually credited to Clayton M. Christensen. But Christensen published in 1997, a year after Dru.

See? I was in at the start of it all. And in the excitement of fotoLibra I'd forgotten about it.

Looks like I jumped the gun the other day when I made the new British Association of Picture LIbraries and Agencies' Digital Guidelines and their XMP Metadata panel available for download from fotoLibra.

They've only just formally announced them, with a typically astute comment from BAPLA's dynamic CEO Linda Royles: “Today’s world is more about data than it is content."

This is how BAPLA presented the new initiatives to image libraries and image buying customers. As fotoLibra Members are so closely involved throughout the whole process we felt it was part of our Open Access duty to make this information available to all Members, and indeed all interested readers. It can only serve to improve image standards and make information easier to find. And that locks into our core philosophies.

BAPLA has launched two new initiatives to encourage consistency when working commercially with digital images; the BAPLA Digital Guidelines v1, and the BAPLA Metadata Panel v1.4.

New Digital Guidelines
The new Digital Guidelines provide a clear framework for both image libraries and image buying customers. The guide was drawn up in consultation with BAPLA’s technical steering committee and working parties and is under international review.

Raising customer awareness of the value and safeguards provided by a reputable picture library makes good commercial sense for both buyer and supplier. Customers need accurate information to make sound decisions at key stages of the workflow. The digital environment makes the need to work with files that are fit for purpose a priority.

“BAPLA is hopeful that these digital guidelines will give our members and their clients a benchmark from which to work, to encourage and facilitate dialogue in ensuring their relevance in a changing market,” said BAPLA CEO Linda Royles.

Download the Guidelines direct from BAPLA here.

Metadata Standards for image professionals
BAPLA has worked with the PPA to create a set of standard fields for use by image professionals in the photography and publishing industries.

Until now the use of available metadata fields has been patchy and inconsistent. This has meant that important data such as picture number, credit and copyright information has often been missing from the digital image.

XML now enables software to pick up image metadata information from images. It is now even more crucial that the fields are consistently populated by professional photographers and picture agencies in a way which is useful for their image buying clients.

The BAPLA / PPA initiative was created in response to the demand from all sides for standardisation. The metadata schema was created after consultation with BAPLA members and the PPA pic4press / pass4press committees.

BAPLA / PPA have agreed on a panel for use in Photoshop which uses a small number of fields already in existence. The image professional now has a useful and time saving way of accessing, viewing and inputting the information and data in one place. The panel can be downloaded free of charge and installed easily for use in Photoshop.

Download the XMP panel direct from BAPLA here.

fotoLibra fully endorses the BAPLA initiative. We encourage our members to adhere as closely as possible to the BAPLA Digital Guidelines, and to add accurate and detailed metadata to all their images uploaded to the fotoLibra web site.

I learned a new word today. No, I'm not ashamed to admit it. Armed as I am with such a spectacular vocabulary, it's pleasant to come across words one hasn't encountered before.

This is how it came about. Jacqui sent out a Picture Call yesterday asking for pictures of bunnies and day-old chicks in long meadow grass with daisies and butterflies etc etc. Perfect for November.

I was looking through some of the submissions and my eye was caught by the most amazing sight: a grinning daisy. Ah, I thought, someone's just found the Liquify filter in Photoshop, and what's more he can't spell Fascinated.

I looked closer. It was a very fine piece of Photoshopping. Then I looked at the keyword Fasciated again. Fascinated didn't fit the context. So I turned to the dictionary:

fas•ci•at•ed
Botany: showing abnormal fusion of parts or organs, resulting in a flattened, ribbonlike structure.

Blimey. Maybe it was real. So I downloaded the image, checked it out and it's real. Not a hint of Photoshopping here. This actually exists. The only thing we did to the image was to correct photographer Mike Lester's spelling of Daisy.

What an amazing photograph. Well done, Mike!

The other day I was writing about the pleasant things everyone tells us about the fotoLibra Support Desk. 'Legendary', a couple of Members have said, because people get the answers they want pretty darn quickly.

This is probably because we don't have anyone working in Support. We all do it, and there's competition to see who can answer someone the quickest. We want Members to be using fotoLibra without problems or downtime, so the sooner we can get any queries sorted out, the better.

Some pals of mine expressed interest as to how we became so expert in everything. Like Goldsmith's schoolmaster:

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew.

There's little point dissembling; we either know the answer or we don't. We usually do because support questions are often the same questions, and they're answered on the web site but it's less fatiguing to email a question than search for an answer. No problem. We're happy to help.

But occasionally — VERY occasionally — we're stumped ourselves. Where do we turn?

We go to the single most useful photography source on the internet. It's called The Luminous Landscape, and it's compiled by a remarkable man named Michael Reichmann. On this site you can find tutorials, product reviews, galleries, location finders, the remarkable 'Understanding Series' and much more.

To give you a taste, the first ten subjects in his current 'Understanding Series'are:

• Understanding Soft Proofing
  
• Understanding Printer Colour Management
  
• Understanding Contrast Masking
  
• Understanding Raw Files
  
• Understanding Digital Unsharp Mask
  
• Understanding Histograms
  
• Understanding MTF Charts
  
• Understanding Digital Sensor Cleaning
  
• Understanding Digital Workflow
  
• Understanding Mirror Lock-Up
  

The site goes on and on, and there's a jewel after every click. It's hard to praise this site highly enough; it's an incredibly valuable resource and a true labour of love.

Reichmann is too modest to tell us about himself on his site, but I did some support research and came up with this:

Michael Reichmann has been both a professional photographer as well as avid amateur for more than 35 years. He is a Contributing Editor to Photo Techniques magazine, a columnist for American Photography magazine, and publisher and primary author of The Luminous Landscape web site – the world’s largest non-commercial site devoted to photographic education. Reichmann is also co-publisher and host of The Video Journal, the world’s only quarterly DVD-video magazine about photography. The Video Journal is now in its sixth year and has subscribers in more than 70 countries world-wide.
Reichmann teaches field workshops and seminars around the world. His recent workshops include trips to Iceland, Costa Rica, Namibia, Bangladesh, China and Antarctica, as well as extensive work in the USA and Canada. He is a frequent invited speaker at conferences worldwide.
Reichmann’s prints and portfolios are found in private as well as public collections in Canada, the U.S., and abroad.

It's a site worthy of your admiration and support. Michael Reichmann is one of the heroes of 21st century photography.

If you open a picture in Photoshop and then go to File> File info, you get an XMP panel, which by default will open in Description. You will see the following fields:
Document Title:
Author:
Description:
Description Writer:
Keywords:
Copyright Status:
Copyright Notice:
Copyright Info URL:

Fairly straightforward, you might think, and you’d be right. But as in every business the devil is in the detail. We could argue for hours (and in the BAPLA Metadata committee, we did) about every nuance of meaning in each descriptor.

At this moment — and it may well change — the BAPLA / pic4press proposed XMP Panel has the following fields:
Image Reference ID: (maps to Document Title in Photoshop’s ‘Description’ panel)
Description: (maps to Caption in the ‘Description’ panel)
Credit: (maps to Credit in Photoshop’s ‘Origin’ panel)
Licensing Contact: (maps to Copyright Info URL in the ‘Description’ panel)
Creator: (maps to Author in the ‘Description’ panel)
Date Created: (maps to Date Created in the ‘Origin’ panel)
Copyright Notice: (maps to Copyright Notice in the ‘Description’ panel)
Rights & Restrictions: (new field)
Headline: (maps to Headline in the ‘Origin’ panel)
Job Reference: (maps to Transmission Reference in the ‘Origin’ panel)

Clearly this will mean a change in the way we all work. But if we’re all working to the same standards, it should make life easier in the long term.

PACA, the American equivalent of BAPLA, has proposed a vastly more complex metadata array that includes such fields as ‘Ethnicity of Model’, which we felt belonged among the keywords.

Hang about, the sharper-eyed among you will say. What’s happened to the keywords?

Good question. I’ll find out and let you know by the end of the week.

The BBC is one of the reasons living in Britain is so great. It is an astoundingly wonderful organisation. Its radio and TV programmes are among the world's best, it's independent of whatever government has connived its way into power, its news reporting is more fair and less biased than anyone else's, and it hosts what is unarguably the world's best web site.

But no one and no organisation can be perfect (except me and fotoLibra, of course) and the BBC, to its profit and shame, has a darker side.

If you join fotoLibra, you agree to our terms and conditions. You can go through the legalese with a fine tooth comb, but what it essentially says is:
1. You retain full ownership of your images
2. We pay you at least 50% of net sales receipts when we sell them.

You can't say fairer than that.

How unlike the BBC contract. The BBC actively solicits contributions from viewers and listeners; not a day goes by without them asking us to send in our photographs.

When you do, you agree to their terms and conditions. You can go through the legalese with a fine tooth comb too, but what it essentially says is:
1. You hand over full ownership of your images to us for free
2. We keep all the money we make from selling them
3. However if problems arise, you carry the can and you pay the costs.

Don't believe me? Could such a trusted organisation engineer such a total rip-off? Read it for yourself (my bold text):

9. Where you are invited to submit any contribution to bbc.co.uk (including any text, photographs, graphics, video or audio) you agree, by submitting your contribution, to grant the BBC a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sub-licenseable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, play, make available to the public, and exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to your contribution worldwide and/or to incorporate your contribution in other works in any media now known or later developed for the full term of any rights that may exist in your contribution, and in accordance with privacy restrictions set out in the BBC's Privacy Policy. If you do not want to grant to the BBC the rights set out above, please do not submit your contribution to bbc.co.uk.


10. Further to paragraph 9, by submitting your contribution to bbc.co.uk, you:
* 10.1 warrant that your contribution;

* 10.1.1 is your own original work and that you have the right to make it available to the BBC for all the purposes specified above;

* 10.1.2 is not defamatory; and

* 10.1.3 does not infringe any law; and

* 10.2 indemnify the BBC against all legal fees, damages and other expenses that may be incurred by the BBC as a result of your breach of the above warranty; and

* 10.3 waive any moral rights in your contribution for the purposes of its submission to and publication on bbc.co.uk and the purposes specified above.

You can read the whole document here if you want it from the horse's mouth.

Give and take? Or take and take?

The solution is not to give photographs to the BBC but to send them to fotoLibra who will SELL them to the BBC on your behalf.

Chwarae teg.

Did you know that as a fotoLibra Member you can have a slideshow of your images which people can access and see anywhere in the world?

All you have to do is send them a link. It will be very like this:
http://www.fotolibra.com/gallery/user/slideshow.php?user_id=****&slideshow
where **** is your User ID. If you don't know your User ID, look at one of your pictures and click on 'view more by this member'. You will see your User ID in your browser's search bar.

When they click on it, they'll be able to enjoy a slideshow of your wonderful pictures in chronological order of upload.

Just another treat from fotoLibra!

I first met Anne-Marie at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1979. I was publicity consultant to the publishers Webb & Bower (among several others) and she was the freelance picture researcher for the same company. The business was doing well, all the staff and consultants were taken out to dinner at a smart restaurant called the Bruckenkeller, and I was plonked at the bottom of the table next to Anne-Marie.

She was intelligent, friendly and great fun. I didn't have a clue what she did, even after she had carefully explained to me what a picture researcher was and what it did; what picture libraries were and why people bought pictures from them. It also hadn't occurred to me that the only alternative was to commission or steal them.

She also had a stand at the book fair, and after that we usually met up in Frankfurt every year, having a dinner together, moaning about publishers, sharing a little gossip and drinking a little too much. Anne-Marie introduced me to other picture researchers and picture librarians, and I discovered a whole new industry I had never encountered before, filled with generally pleasant people.

As everyone must now know, in 2002 I had the epiphantastic idea to create fotoLibra, a new kind of picture library. Naturally, the first person I ran the idea by was Anne-Marie. She was startled to hear from me as she probably thought I only lived in Frankfurt. When I told her about it, a change crept over her. Her usual cheery countenance was gradually replaced by a rather more frosty demeanour. I couldn't quite understand it, but for the first time I could see why her staff were terrified of her.

It took me a while to realise that I had suddenly changed from a pal she could share a laugh and a drink with to becoming a potential commercial rival. "You'll need at least 25,000 images before anyone will take you seriously," she sniffed.

At 2:30am on the first morning of the BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair 2005, the first one we'd exhibited at, we passed the 25,000 image mark. I sought out Anne-Marie to tell her the joyful news. "Nice," she snarled.

Yesterday we passed 140,000 images. And yesterday evening The Picture Desk, Anne-Marie's company, held a leaving bash for her to which we were kindly invited. It was great fun, and I realised (I knew all along really) with what respect her staff and peers hold her in. She is a master of her craft.

She's not actually retiring, just stepping back to devote more time to her new passion: showing people the unseen sights of London. She's becoming a walking guide, a docent, leading parties round the strange delights the world's greatest city has to offer.

I've written a couple of guides to London: 'London: What Happened Here" published by Pomegranate in California and 'London: Sight Unseen' with photographs by Snowdon, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London.

So for Anne-Marie's leaving present I gave her a copy of 'London: Sight Unseen'.

It was the least I could do, now that we've swapped occupations.

fotoLibra was accused of having ‘disruptive technology’ the other day and I confess I initially bridled. A mother is not best pleased if you peer into the pram and exclaim “My God! What an ugly baby!”

I got labelled ‘disruptive’ at school and I can assure you it was no compliment. But strangely enough, this description seems to have been intended as a positive statement about fotoLibra. It seems it’s a Good Thing to implement disruptive technology because it shakes up the status quo and makes clients, competitors and customers rethink their position.

But when we created fotoLibra it was never our intention to disrupt anybody or anything. We didn’t invent anything new or revolutionary, all we did was take existing technologies and businesses and yoke them together. Everybody else had the bright ideas; we just bound them together for the first time.

Montaigne phrased it rather more elegantly when he presented his anthology, “I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and only the thread that binds them is my own.”

I covered this subject in an earlier blog, where I recommended that 8 bits was perfectly adequate for most photographs uploaded to fotoLibra.

We now have another reason for preferring 8 bits, one that revises our earlier recommendation. Our firm recommendation is now this:
UPLOAD 8-BIT IMAGES. DO NOT UPLOAD 16-BIT IMAGES.

Is that any clearer? I was a bit woolly before, because 16 bit gives higher quality, and we are keen on providing the highest possible picture quality to our clients.

But when professional buyers download TIFFs from the site, they often click the box to compress the image for faster download speed. This, as you might guess, converts the image into a JPEG (at maximum quality, of course) and because the buyer knows this will be the first appearance of the picture as a JPEG, they know the quality will not be compromised.

However we have been getting the odd complaint that purchase downloads have failed. It was always for the same reason: they were attempting to download 16-bit TIFFs as JPEGs. And you can’t. The JPEG format won’t accept 16 bits. Try saving a 16-bit TIFF as a JPEG and you will find the option simply isn’t there.

So the download fails. And the buyer gets upset. Of course, we always sort it out for them, but we lose that extra degree of automation the buyers like so much.

The solution is simple. Please save your TIFFs as 8-bit. Technology will catch up, but that’s today’s advice.