The fast moving stock photography industry
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Digital photos are now delivered by millions every day.
Remember the days where the client was briefing the commercial who was brefieng the art director who was briefing the... STOP!
The digital era has revolutionized how stock images are made and how they are used. Online picture libraries, sorry they are called stock photos
websites allow clients to directly search for images from their desk on at home, add them to an online lightbox and communicate their selection
to the creative team in charge of design. The whole process can be done within a few hours. Then the stock images are purchased and downloaded by the
printer or bureau for immediate production. This workflow is now identical more nearly every piece of print produced since the explosion of
stock photos agencies.
In the same way the submission process for photographers contributing to the stock photos libraries is as fast as downloading photographic files.
Contributors, once member of a library, can upload stock images within seconds providing thay have a fast internet connection and digital camera equipment
with sufficient resolution and quality lenses.
It all started with Photodisc in the 90's producing themed royalty-free photo CD for the advertising and design community. It was a rapid sucess and new
stock image brands quickly started with the same concept: A tighly edited collection of stock photos, sold with a royalty free license and packaged as a CD.
These photo brands: Stockbyte, Digital vision, Image100,
Image Source, Photo Alto, Goodshoot, Banana Stock,
Phovoir, Comstock... Were established before 2000
and selling CDs and single images directly and through a network of woldwide distributors. The internet technology made this possible and picture buyers
were happy.
Soon these stock images brands were acquired by bigger players like Corbis, Jupiterimages and Getty images. Today only a handfull remain independant and
still produce stock images. While these large publishers still sell stock images through their website, the small photo distributors like Epictura
play a major role in licensing images to the end users. They are close to their customers, understand their image requirements and provide value added services
for picture search, image purchase history and license information.
New development within the stock images community is the arrival of the microstock. the first player was istockphoto who started a few years back with low quality
images but prices for amateur designers with no budget. Slowly the quality of stock images increased over the years. Today a few other brand have emerged with
a quality of images suitable for most low end projects and small creative budget, quite close to lower stock images publishers. Epictura has followed these
developments very closely and launched this year its own royalty-free microstock photo site www.stocklib.com.
The Prices on stocklib are very low not because of the quality of images it offers but rather it is made possible by the concept of leting contributing
photographers participate to a market place where images can be uploaded and made royalty-free immediately. From talented amateur photographers or graphic
artists to pro shooters with experience in working for traditional stock images agencies the range of contributors constitutes the core concept of stocklib,
a stock images website offering images from around the world depicting our modern and traditional way of life with model released photographs for commercial
and editorial publications.
As mentioned above, after acquiring most royalty free stock images archives, Corbis, Jupiterimages and Getty images showed interest is the microstock model and begin
a buyout of community based micro photos sites like istockphoto, stockxpert and Corbis started with Snapvillage. Today some other micro stock photos website try
to sell low cost stock images beside these brands like Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Fotolia or BigStockPhoto. They can be trusted as microstock sellers but only one
photo agency provide the whole range of stock images needed by communication and advertising agencies and this is Epictura.
The future of the stock image industry is quite bright with different models coexisting next to each others. Middle stock, the middle range priced stock images
for the royalty-free market is only emerging. This is probably where the future lies. Many photo publisher brands will have to lower prices in order to reach a much wider
audience and microstock photo agencies will have to increase their fees for downlaods or subscriptions under pressure from the stock images community.
Epictura will continue to watch closely the stock image market and enter distribution agreements with only top quality agencies in order to serve its clients with
the best possible stock images brands providing real value to the purchase of royalty free photography.
Today you can find on Epictura image bank, over 3.5 millions stock images with prices ranging from 1 dolar to 569 dolars per photo. This is the widest offering
under a single stock images distributor. Epictura has extended its collection to micro stock images recently, since the demand for low cost stock images has
exploded and customers with low budget are finding traditional royalty free stock images to expensive for their communication budget. Still a lot of our customer
in the advertising sector want high quality stock images which we can provide with the Corbis, Getty, pixtal stock images collections.
Our french version, banque d'images Epictura and our spanish version
Epictura banco de imagenes provides to an international market, stock images of very high quality since 2002.
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