Some of you have asked how to use an FTP client to upload pictures and vectors to Cutcaster. The below video shows you how to use the FTP client, Filezilla, which is open source (aka. It’s free) for both Mac and Windows, to upload multiple image files to our server and then how to process your files by clicking the “Process my FTP Uploads” button from your upload page.
If you haven’t seen how simple our new photo lightboxes are to use for organizing and sharing your picture collections then you should check out this 1 minute video tutorial on how to create photo collections.
Our creative team has been busy using this new feature to create stunning picture lightboxes of Cutcaster contributor’s artwork.
Easter is fast approaching and it’s just about that time when image buyers and researchers begin their image search to find the best Easter pictures for Easter 2011. According to Christian religion, Easter is the greatest feast day in the Christian 2011 calendar, and celebrates the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This year Easter 2011 falls on April 24th. Our creative team at Cutcaster has assembled a few Easter picture lightboxes to help find the best Easter images fast. Cutcaster offers a wide selection of easter clipart, easter bunny pictures, easter egg picture as well as free easter pictures. So if you need Easter photos or vectors for your Easter basket, an Easter egg hunt or to symbolize the religious significance of the day check out our Easter photo collection and Easter egg picture lightbox.
The above Easter pictures are the copyright of their respective owners and can be purchased and used for only a few dollars after you purchase a royalty free license from Cutcaster.
A few weeks back, we posted the first part of our stock picture buying survey. T
he response to the release of information on photo buying habits in the stock industry was great to hear. Many people sent us emails or posted on forums saying how much they appreciated a stock agency sharing information and shedding light on an industry that doesn’t have a lot of publicly available information. One email we got was especially helpful and raised questions we felt could be clarified so readers could do more with the results.
"Stock Photo" Living Legend
Jim Pickerell is a stock photo “guru,” whose savvy analysis of industry data and experience in the stock photo business stand up to just about anyone’s around the globe. From the information we shared with Jim, he dug through and analyzed our survey results. Jims’ insights helped our team re-sort the way we arranged the data we had collected and better understand what the data was actually telling us.
Below are portions from an email, we received from Jim, along with additional information, we are releasing today to help others make their assessment of the numbers and data. We didn’t want to add too much opinion below but wanted to share Jim’s thoughts (with his permission of course) and add some more background on the data and panelists. This market information on picture buyers and their habits is even more useful now to those studying the size of the stock photo market and the people who work in it.
Jim Pickerell (Jim):
I presume the respondents to this survey are all from your customer base, and not necessarily a good cross section of microstock customers as a whole (I’m not sure how anyone other than iStock or Shutterstock would ever get such a cross section.)
Cutcaster Response (CC):
We wish they were all current Cutcaster customers but that is not entirely accurate. While we did send the survey to a list of our buyers at Cutcaster, the list encompasses a cross section of buyers who have signed up at Cutcaster, contacts from Adbase (Adbase is a email service provider that has lists of creatives across multiple industries in North America who use creative imagery), image users on 3rd party sites, picture buying forums and individually emailing buyers we know to ask them to participate. Their professional backgrounds covered most industries. Almost all responses came from image buyers in North American with the next largest group being South America and the UK.
Jim:
It is interesting to me that such a high percentage of the respondents (25.3%) are involved in book, magazine or newspaper publishing. I would think that for the microstock industry as a whole that percentage might be somewhat less, although these people may use a large quantity of images.
CC:
We made the same assumption but your observation might be changed by our response to the answers we gave above regarding our survey pool. In addition, the percentage could change as we add people who answered the question with “Other” into industry categories that their job would place them in even if they didn’t click off that industry. Some photo researchers who would work with multiple industries might have thrown this off slightly. We didn’t poll the respondents regarding their use of royalty free vs rights managed but we assume they are using a mixture of both of just RF. Also we think some of the higher end buyers who didn’t know about microstock and the more affordable microstock imagery are starting to find these new agencies and pricing models and moving their licensing dollars to those companies.
Here is a cross section of some of the resources that users who answered that they were invovled in the used these agencies when sourcing information. You can see how much Getty and Corbis dominate and that’s to be expected. The question asked, “What are your top three resources for finding stock photos?” and each row shows one responders’ answers.
| Getty Images | iStockphoto | Alamy Images | ||
| Getty Images | Shutterstock | Alamy Images | ||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Veer | Alamy | |
| Corbis | iStockphoto | Cutcaster | ||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Alamy Images | ||
| Getty Images | Masterfile | |||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Alamy Images | ||
| Corbis | Alamy Images | SPECIALTY PHOTOGRAPHERS | ||
| Alamy Images | Corbis | Shutterstock | ||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Cutcaster | we use many | |
| Getty Images | Corbis | Google Image | ||
| Getty Images | Corbis | Google Image | iStockphoto | Alamy |
| Getty Images | Corbis | iStockphoto | Alamy | |
| Alamy Images | Shutterstock | Granger | ||
Jim:
It would be interesting to come up with a total number of times a year these people purchase images compared with the number of times for “graphic design firms” and “Freelancer Ad/Graphic”.
CC:
We like your thinking here and will re-sort the data into that view you asked about. Scouring over the responses, it appears the publishing industry is buying a larger amount of images at varying prices but more infrequently versus the “graphic design firms” and “Freelancer Ad/Graphic” companies who download a lot images in smaller numbers and at lower prices throughout the year.
Jim:
One of the big questions is how much small graphic design firms and freelance graphic artists are driving the business. My guess is that the combined total of the 26.6% of respondents are mostly 1 to 4 person shops and that they purchase imagery a very high number of times per year. (It would be great if you have some type of breakdown of how many images these people used annually.)
CC:
From what we can see it appears you are correct. We can re-filter the data to see what we can come up with regarding smaller businesses driving the market changes.
Jim:
Getting back to the publishers if there is any way to determine how much imagery they are using it would be great. Are they all using more than 50 images per year, or are they only going to microstock sites 2 or 3 times a year. If there is good reason to believe that this group of customers is representative of the industry as a whole, and that they are using a lot of images it says a lot about what the future holds for the traditional licensingmodel.
CC:
Here is a sampling of the first 15 results based on pulling some of the information out of our excel sheets. It first shows how many times a year they are buying an image and then how much on average do they spend per image. This appears to be representative of the entire panelist group who responded that they worked in publishing.
1. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
2. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
3. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
4. More than 50 times per year > Over $250
5. 3-10 times per year > $101 to $250
6. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
7. More than 10 times per year > $51 to $10
8. More than 10 times per year > $101 to $250
9. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
10. More than 50 times per year > $51 to $100
11. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
12. More than 50 times per year > Over $250
13. More than 50 times per year > $101 to $250
14. More than 50 times per year >$101 to $250
15. More than 10 times per year >$101 to $250
Jim:
Another thing that is very interesting is who the 21.3% of “other” buyers are. I would have thought you would have covered virtually everyone in all your other categories of use. More of an explanation of who is in this category would be helpful.
CC:
Here is a list of just a few of the job titles that survey respondents used to describe their work. When we dug back over the results from other we realized that some of the respondents could have been grouped in some of the other industry categories and some photo researchers could be lumped into other groups. Below is a short list of some of their responses for other to give you an idea:
1. Occasional buyer small projects
2. Writer/blogger
3. Building my own, small niche web sites
4. Gift Giver
5. Broker buying and sellings businesses
6. Freelance Photo Researcher for book publishers
7. Home entertainment – make DVDs
8. Marketing firm
9. Law Firm
10. TV/broadcast
11. Corporate in-house design unit
12. Record Label
13. Interior design and graphic design
14. Self-employed
15. Wholesale Beverage Distributor
Jim:
I am surprised that the “government, etc.” category only had 4% of the respondents. I would have thought this group would have been much larger.
CC:
Same.
Jim:
53.3% of respondents say they typically spend more than $51 per image. This may be true of your customer base, but it is certainly not true of all microstock customers. Maybe you are only attracting the high end customers. If that is true then it is certainly something that needs to be taken into account when considering the overall survey results.
CC:
We don’t only cater to microstock customers because photographers and designers can set their prices at Cutcaster so that is why we believe you will see a broader cross section of industries and spend rates across the board.
Thank you to Jim for providing his insight and letting us respond on our blog. We hope this helps those who want to learn more about he stock photography marketplace in general.
Here are two very short videos to help you understand how the new lightbox system works. We have a few more tweaks to make to the feature but the first video shows you how you should be
creating a new image lightbox and then second video shows you how you can add an image to a photo lightbox.
We will be releasing shortly the ability to delete lightboxes, set them to public vs private and also the ability to easily send them via the site instead of copying and pasting the URL into an email to someone. Hope these help and please pass along your feedback regarding the lightbox functionality.
Verizon versus AT&T.
On his way to the subway, near 32nd & 6 ave in NYC, Michael Surtees noticed an interesting advertisement that was unlike anything he had seen before. Positioned in a high traffic area for pedestrians going both to Penn Station in one direction, and K Town in the other, the poster advertisement makes it pretty simple for someone to show their displeasure of either ATT or Verizon. It even looks like a couple of people changed their mind post-vote, or perhaps there’s an AT&T gum squad patrolling Manhattan. Probably would have been more fair if the logos were side by side instead of one over the other.
From Design Notes, by NYC-based designer @MichaelSurtees.
UPDATE: This was the poster 4 days after the above image was taken.
Thanks to Michael for sharing this engaging and funny ad.
Are you happy with your image agency?
What features or services do image buyers like and want from photographers or stock agencies? What gets them coming back to your portfolio or the agency that reps your images?
Today, Cutcaster is releasing the comments that some images buyers told us during last year’s survey. We took 10 of the most popular comments and arranged them below in a random order to show you what features or services they like an agency to offer. The question was actually a two-part question and was “What do you like most/least about the stock photo sites that you work with?” Later this week, we will share the things they didn’t like about their current stock image agency. The survey was completed by 344 image users who had used Cutcaster or were working on the stock image business and were mostly from the US or Canada.
Top 10 things image buyers said they liked which their stock agency provided.
1. Current and wide selection of images from international sources at reasonable prices.
2. Special picture collection pricing for royalty free or rights managed photos.
3. Stock agency websites that can show an entire photo purchase history with a simple click to avoid duplicate image purchases.
4. With current rates that image researchers get, we need to work FAST. The most important features for a stock site are direct downloading and embedded metadata. If you do not offer these two things, you are a 2nd tier vendor.
5. Picture pop-up windows to review images instead of having to use “back” button.
6. Advanced features like search filters when we need to give restrictions.
7. Love seeing Creative Inspiration.
8. Great sales help when a user encounters a problem. (From Cutcaster: Most image buyers didn’t say they needed a specific sales representative to help them use an agency)
9. High resolution comp images with metadata embedded.
10. Agencies with multicultural, disabilities, youth, and well executed food shots most cited image needs.
Overall, most image buyers stressed that they needed the highest quality images, fast / accurate search results and lower pricing which is understandable in the current economic environment.
If you are an image buyer, what features would you like to see a stock agency adopt to make your life easier?
We fixed all of the issues with the new FTP server and connecting with Amazon. Some people noticed that there was a difference in the number of files that Cutcaster reported being accepted and in their portfolio versus what they were seeing on the si
te. That issue should also be fixed. The problem was a delay in the re-sizing of the uploaded images which we corrected.
We are making sure we support as many FTP clients and uploading services as possible. We recommend using Filezilla if you want an easy to use FTP client that works at Cutcaster.
We are aware Cyberduck FTP may not be working currently. That will be updated.
Last year we had the honor of being one of the first sponsors and presenters at the Bees Awards, which recognizes excellence in using social media. The Bees team is at it again and will be holding their second annual Bees Awards this May and they wou
ld like to invite you to submit your best social media work. The deadline is March 31, 2011.
Visit: www.beesawards.com
4 days left before the next entry cost increase.
The Bees Awards – 1st international social media marketing awards -
will be held on May 3, 2011 at the Legion of Honor of San Francisco.
A jury of 20 experts from 15 countries will grant recognition to the
best social media campaigns of the world.
Participation in 2010:
- 21 countries
- 74% large brands
- 5 continents
Meet with the 2011 jury: www.beesawards.com/bees/2011jury
Review the 2010 winners: www.beesawards.com/bees/finalists2010
Submit your work today at: www.beesawards.com/bees/entry
Be aware that over the next 24-48 hours, we will be taking the site offline to replace it with the new Cutcaster site. We’re like a kid before Christmas. Our plan is to switch to the new site later this evening Eastern Standard Time EST. The site wil
l be down for updates and when it returns we hope you love the drastic improvements. While some sites are “pinching” their contributor’s pay, alienating their customers’ needs, or closing their doors, Cutcaster delivered a more intelligent image search tool, that operates lightning quick speeds, with superior results and will move picture buyers beyond their dated agencies. Allow us a second chance to make a first impression.
Any updates we have on the release will be posted here, our Facebook page or our Twitter account.
UPDATE (12/19/2011 11:30pm PST) – Countdown is underway to move over a large chunk of the metadata from the old database to the new site which has been tested and is ready to debute. Tomorrow we will pull the site offline. It’s amazing how true it is that 99% of the work comes in the last 1% of the details.
Hang out with us!
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