Micro Choosy

Posted on June 25th, 2009 in Cameras, MicroStock, Microstock markets, News, Sites, image management

Lake Shimmer

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This an entry from the other side of the looking glass. Alice, hold onto to your camera.

Everybody knows that getting an image file accepted on one of the big microstock sites can be a challenge and a sweet victory to be savored. So when one of my clients proposed a new geo city name website, I followed up with a look at the available images. Nada!!!!

Considering how choosy they are I should NOT have beenÂ disappointed to see there were no image results for the city name I plugged into the search box. But I am a bit of a website purist and like to have images from the place the website is about when making that website. The last thing you want to do is practice duplicity on your premier demographic user base of potential visitors.

If the rejection volume is what I think it is, this is a real flaw in the image acceptance policy.Â Shouldn’t I be the one to determine if the shots are good enough for me to consider? I wonder if the agency had been more receptive I would have gotten more then one single image result, a generic image that I can’t use for my domain that is geo city specific.

I posted my frustration in aÂ thread at one of the digital photo forums and got a reply back referring me to a link to www.istockphoto.com. Unfortunately while the state had a lotÂ of images, the city I was searching had no results. Zip.

This puts me in the pocket of that customer who doesn’t want to negotiate with a hundred Craigslist weirdos for what would be $10 to $15 worth of commerce. Wouldn’t it be nice if right nowÂ I could find someone with that locale already having images keyworded and tagged in their own gallery to buy? <sigh>.

What I am wondering is: if instead of offering the option of free submissions each microstock site generously allows for their gallery (driving more traffic to the site via tags) , each member gets to submit 1 (one) elective image that has been rejected. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see the sales figures on the images customers otherwise would never have gotten to see?

I have thus far tried Bigstockphoto.com, Fotolia, Istockphoto.com, and Dreamstime.com. NONE of them had one single image with that city keyword. When I tried city and state they had other pictures in that state from other cities. Microstockers, do you smell the opportunity here? How can a city have not one single picture anywhere online?

I will now post a thread in one of the forums I have joined to see what image files I can wrangle thataway.