Keyword placement and search relevance
The Artists at Alamy have devised a system to see how you rank as an artists against your peers, they call it the BHZ game, where you add BHZ as the first keyword to an RM licensed image, then after 48 hours you can search on the term BHZ, based on where your image turns up in the search then that is your ranking, this is flawed in many ways as there can be many other factors, the other keywords, date uploaded, number of views and zooms, and Alamy’s diversity algorithm.
So on any stock website just how do you know if your keyword positioning is correct, and how your image is placed with it’s peers, I would like to share the method I use on my Alamy images and see what other artists think, with a small portfilio amongst over 17 million images, as a part-time photographer I often wonder how the buyers find my images, I do get recorded views, zooms with an odd sale here and there.
How-To: Isolation over White with Photoshop
We have been asked by several people how-to do a Photoshop Isolation over white effect, to help stop QA rejections for stray Isolation
We took an image in a studio with a set of cheap studio lights from EBay, the backdrop was just a king-sized white flat sheet, hanging from the wall and draped over a chair.
New Businesses and Digital Real Estate
Every month we see one or two start-up companies hoping to take a slice of the merchants digital asset revenue, generated from digital artists license sales.
The new businesses or services are usually owned by people that have maybe tried contributing to the existing digital asset sites, created applications as a service to help artists submit their assets to the websites, or have an existing digital online business for other forms of digital assets.
Fire-starters that will either do well and soar or just crash and burn, these are the phrases I would use for some the new businesses, that are coming from a limited exposure to the world of digital asset delivery.
Content and usage is just the buyers problem?
Firstly I must say that this is by no means legal advice, just my understanding and opinions on some of the aspects of digital asset delivery via the internet.
Looking around the various Forums and Blogs I often read that the end client or customer is legally responsible for the image, and how the image is used, but what about the image content are you sure that you have no responsibility that you have not already discharged as an artist or agent.
There are some sweeping statements which are often used as a blanket response for all types of possible scenarios and image violations, but rarely do the posts and comments question the artists and merchants responsibilities, and was enough really done to protect the interests of the artist, agency, merchant, end client or customer?
PAWS for thought new model ideas
I have been looking at different ideas for a new digital asset delivery system, a model where the artist has more control and a bigger share of the revenue, and the assets are delivered direct to the customers browser, these are just my ideas and I would not be in a position to launch such a service so this is just a discussion point.
The key to any new model is putting the infrastructure in place, and that place for many of the recent businesses is in cloud technology and this is firmly the domain of Amazon Web Services, the biggest showstopper at the moment being Amazons FPS Flexible Payments System, this service will only work with a US bank account, until they change this it complicates the payment process, I have been in contact and they say they are looking at expanding this service to other countries.
