The star design and project of this company is a stock photo search engine website entitled ImageTrail. The goal of the website is to bring together as many microstock agencies as can be rounded up efficiently and display stock photo search results much like Google Images. The key difference is that the results will be professional, but affordable images. We are trying to bring these images to people who may never have heard of this industry of the availibility of such great work and most can be purchased for a buck!

This has certainly been a busy month for me. We have been contacted by a few different agencies about listing their images. We have worked out a great partnership with LuckyOliver which I am pretty proud of. LuckyOliver has been one of my favorite “new finds”. Their focus is truly a community site and they seem very skilled at building a brand.

Growth

The Image database is now over 500k images and I will be increasing the speed with which I let it grow. I have tried to be careful this far because I believe that “junk in / junk out” gets magnified in a database. I hope to see 1 million images by August.

The New York Times wrote a large article about Bill Gate’s Corbis Images. They mentioned microstock and its entrance as a challenge to the stock photography community. As Imagetrail will hopefully someday prove, the results of microstock photography are a little more than “amatuer or semi-professional”. In my opinion much of what is found on microstock site is more professional. The interfaces are often harder to deal with, but they also are improving.

Time will tell whether microstock will conquer, or just co-exist. There will always be different needs and different markets in stock imagery.

“What Corbis did not foresee was the rise of so-called microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. These sites take advantage of the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, or turning to the online masses for free or low-cost submissions. Thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers armed with high-quality digital cameras and a copy of Photoshop contribute photographs to microstock sites, which often charge $1 to $5 an image.”

Read the article @ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/10corbis.html