Moneybookers no longer a payment option

I just logged into Moneybookers to make a payment to one of our contributors and saw this message.


Warning

IMPORTANT NOTICE

We regret to inform you that payments between US customers, and US customers and international customers using the Send Money service are no longer supported.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.


We are still reviewing our options but I believe that going forward we will have to pay out international contributors via check. Has anyone else heard of this news?

Cutcaster Holiday Contest Winners and Runner-ups

First off, I want to thank everyone who submitted images and vectors for our first Cutcaster Holiday contest. We recieved a really diverse set of images and vectors and had a hard time narrowing it down to just one winner for the vectors and images. Below are the top three submissions in both file types and the winner. Congrats to all those that participated and to the winners.

First we will start with vectors as there were a ton of great submissions. We are a huge fan of vectors here at Cutcaster so keep them rolling in. The two runner-ups in this year's contest were: Leonid Dorfman for "Illustration of Greeting card for Christmas"

and Michael Travers for "Illustration of snow globe ribbon."

Great work guys.

And now, without further delay, your 2008 Cutcaster vector contest winner is Jip Fens for his Illustration of Christmas party.

This illustration was chosen for its' concept and uniqueness. Nice work Jip.

Now we will move onto the photo side of the competition. The runner-ups for the photo contest were from two great contributors.

First runner up was Robert Byron's "Christmas Stocking."

Just nipping him out for second place was Robert Carner's "Christmas, the magic time of year."

And the winner is...drum roll pleaseeeeee.....Vince Clements and his "child's christmas wish list."


Chosen for the excellent composition and colors. This photo truely brings out the Christmas Spirit.

Very proud of everyone and excited by all the submissions. Congrats to everyone and especially Jip and Vince. You guys have won the first annual Cutcaster Holiday Contest.

Cutcaster Holiday Contest

Our Holiday contest is almost over and wanted to tell you to quickly get in your submission before the deadline on Friday. You have two days to submit your favorite images and vectors for a chance to win the prize. Just upload them and check them off so they are included in the judge's discussion.

Good Luck.

For more info on the Cutcaster image and vector contest click here.

What does Google's partnership with LIFE and Getty mean for you?

I'm sure most of you have read the news of Google and LIFE announcing that they will make LIFE's vast photo archive available for free public perusal on Google. Sounds very cool but where do you fall in this digital media debate.

This deal could be interesting and bad on a few fronts.

First, if Google takes care of the archiving, adshare and searching, Getty deals with all the licensing and LIFE just provides the stills, then they all share in the advertising revenue and they can split the marketing efforts between three sites. This partnership could drive a lot of traffic to LIFE.com, which is a joint venture between Getty and Time Inc. LIFE.com will make money from advertising and sales of photo books and prints. Now images are displayed on Google with links that allow customers to buy framed prints through the print-on-demand service called QOOP.com. The three participants will not pay attention to personal uses and will offer a mid sized image without watermarks but the high resolution files will be watermarked. Not sure how the licensing will be worked out yet and what the user experience will be like. The watermark on the high resolution image after checking it out is really small and just in the lower corner of the image. Doesn't really protect anything. I did hear from one source that the images all had Digimarc embedded watermarks for tracking but after checking that out it appears that in the medium and large sizes there
were no Digimarcs, and absolutely no metadata.

On the flip side this development could create a few problems. What about the issue of orphaned works? David Riecks at Controlled Vocabulary argued that LIFE magazine's parent company is basically flooding the market with a lot of orphaned images. Working with Google, they will know have an archive of images from the 1860s to the 1980s online (I found an image shot in 1989) and the images will be without the embedded metadata.

If you are interested you can click here to see the images yourself that will be available.

PDN reported on the deal here.

A Google blog announcing the partnership and new collection can be found here.

What do you think about all this? How will this affect you or won't it affect you?

New Cutcaster Search released

Search and Keywords management have been the name of the game the last 5 months at Cutcaster. What an effort! We have been trickling out updated variations of our search and updating some of your keywords over that time but today we updated a large portion of the search engine which you will notice when you do keyword and advance searches. It is still a work in progress and will only improve if you guys keep emailing us and telling us where we can fix it and make it better. A huge update / change is coming up at the end of the month so your help is very much needed. We promise you will be happy with the results.

Test it out and let us know what you think. Also if you are logged in and do a search, make sure you click on the red X below thumbnails if the thumbnail shouldn't have shown up in the search results that were returned to you.

Very exciting day and lots more good things to come. Lettt'ssss Gooooo everyone at Cutcaster.

Ideas for new shoots- What buyers are looking for

More and more we are hearing that graphic designers, advertisers and publishers are seeing the same images on every single site and they feel they have seen every image out there. We need to shake it up a bit.

There are a lot of categories that are not well represented in RF and need to be photographed in a non-cheesy, non-stocky way. I hear it all the time. Buyers really want pictures of real life situations that are candid, non-posed imagery that depicts its subjects behaving naturally. Authenticity is key. Here are some topics from the Photoshelter buyer research that can help you determine what you want to shoot. Post any ideas or other suggestions you have below.

The Photoshelter buyers survey found that there were major categories in which the "availability/quality/diversity (usefulness) of images typically found" was "poor to average". The following categories were pinpointed as the top 10 weakest:

1. Healthcare. 88%
2. Multicultural/Diversity. 86%
3. Seniors. 86%
4. Technology & Products. 85%
5. Interior Décor. 84%
6. Eco-Friendly. 81%
7. Business Situations & Settings. 72%
8. Celebrity. 72%
9. Sports/Activities. 71%
10. Children/Young Adults. 72%

The key will be to take original and interesting new shots that look authentic. If you can do that you will have a winner.

How I Keyword Images? By a Cutcaster Contributor

As you know we have been going over some of your files and helping people with their keywording. We still need everyone to go back in and do this themselves. However when I was going through one contributors work, I was pleasantly surprised to see how well he keyworded his images. He was great at adding in singular words and compound phrases that really describe both the image and to a smaller degree concepts surrounding the image. I emailed him to ask about his keywording workflow and this is what he said. It's simple and I hope it helps.

"As is well known, keywording is just as important as having a good image and without effective keywords an image will never be found and thus will never be sold. I keep a searchable database with all of the keyword combinations that I use. When I shoot a new image I first go to the database to find keywords that are good matches. I always ask myself the same questions about every image; who, what, when, where and why. I try to think of the best keywords that answer those questions and then search the Internet for things relating to those keywords. I carefully filter out anything that I don't think is relative to the image and the good results go straight to the IPTC of the image and in to my database. It used to take me a considerable amount of time to use this method but after using it for several years, it now takes me less than 5 minutes to effectively create keywords for an image. Practice makes perfect."

Everyone has their own workflow and process for adding keywords. We would like to hear yours. Add it to the comments below.

Keywording is going to be so important going forward so I need everyones help in dealing with this issue.

Photographers Unite

More great news out of Getty ;-)

Photographers are suing Getty Images over a subscription pricing plan. The group of stock photographers has filed a class-action lawsuit which asserts that by including rights-managed stock images in the Getty Images Premium Access subscription product, Getty violated copyright and broke its contract with rights-managed contributors. The suit says Getty’s product makes rights-managed images available under royalty-free license terms for unreasonably low prices.

According to the class action suit, Getty is paying photographers a pro-rata share of Premium Access fees when their images are downloaded through the program. Payments have been as low as $2.08, according to the lawsuit – substantially lower than a photographer’s share of a traditional rights-managed stock sale. “In Premium Access, Getty essentially allows its customers to set the amount of photographers’ royalties themselves,” the suit says. “Not surprisingly, this results in royalties equal to a tiny fraction of the commercial value of the photographers’ photographs.”

Makes me sick. Getty is undercutting the market and destroying the value of these images even more in the future. Here is to Photographers flexing their muscles, demanding change and expecting a fair shake. This is a great step and development.

A virtual site walk-through...

We just made this quick site tour with a cool new (free) screen recording app called Screentoaster. Pretty cool stuff, check it out:

Recorded with screentoaster.com

Three Billion Photos At Flickr

Today marked a big day at Flickr. Flickr member, Garrett Ryan Smith, uploaded the 3 billionth photo to the site today. They hit 2 billion photos just last year ago.

Facebook leads the pack with over 10 billion. And Facebook is moving fast. A year ago Facebook had just 4.1 billion photos.

Flickr launched in 2004.

Get out and Vote today

If you are in the USA, please get out and vote today. I just got back ;-)