Picfair.com introduce global price change tool:

Copyright: Duncan Andison/Dreamstime.com

For anyone that's not looked at the Picfair site for a while there is now a new feature that I have been asking for right from the start. A global price change tool that allows you to edit the price of all your images at once.

From the start I have always priced all my images at £10 per licence, however, I have wondered how different price points might influence sales. As I have written before £10 is expensive for, say, a blogger but cheap for a National newspaper.

To be fair, Picfair have previously offered to perform a bulk price change at their end but having the convenience of doing it yourself is much better. You'll find it on the top right of your portfolio page there. Obviously, this only works if you want all your images at the same price. You can still individually edit the price of each image just as you always could.

You will get a warning that any global price change is irreversible but it also says that you can bulk change your prices again. Confused? I assume that what they mean is that if you currently have a range of prices for different images and you bulk change them to a new single price you cannot go back to all different prices again (other than by individual editing).

Anxious to try this new feature I went for a dramatic 50% reduction to £5 per licence. The feature does say it will take a while to populate to all your images but it seemed to be pretty instant in my case. What has happened, however, is the bulk change button is still saying that it is updating my prices a week or so later and does not function  - so I cannot now change my price back even if I wanted to. I'm guessing they don't want people changing pricing on a daily basis -so be warned that once you use this feature it will be a while before you can change things again. I'll keep checking and see when it becomes functional again. Nethertheless, it's good to finally have this feature in place. Regards, David.
ETA - Just heard from Picfair via Twitter: They're looking into that as the button should have updated ready to be used again.

Persisting with Picfair:

The Sinceros -my most viewed image on Picfair

When I first posted about British photo agency Picfair back in November 2013 I was certainly full of hope for this new venture and even more so when I got my first sale just a couple of weeks later. So, time for an update.

Well, first the headline fact, I have yet to have had my second sale there despite my portfolio now numbering some 870 images. Am I giving up on them? Not at this stage and here is why.

Founded by former journalist Benji Lanyado in 2013 the site has gradually grown -both in the number of images available and the team itself. Very much a one man band at the start Picfair now has a number of people on its team which you can see on the "About" section of their site. Originally launched in Beta the site is now fully functioning as an image selling agency and received a substantial boost of investment last Summer (read about that here http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/08/picfair-raises-520k-to-take-on-getty-with-an-image-marketplace/ ). Ignore the "taking on Getty" headline -I'm pretty sure that they are not actually claiming that!

So what's great about Picfair? Well the two big attractions to me are firstly that there are no reviews to go through. You get the images online and for sale that you want, not filtered through somebody elses opinion or taste. Just like having your own photo selling site in fact. Secondly, and most importantly, you get to choose your own selling price and receive 100% of that amount (Picfair make their money by adding a percentage on top to the buyer -currently 20%).

This choose your own price feature does has its own set of issues, however. Firstly, some great photographers are setting their prices really low. I have seen some stunning images being offered at little above the minimum allowed pricing of £1. This doesn't make it easy for those of us trying to get a reasonable fee for our images. Which leads to the second (big) issue -just what should you price your images at? All mine are at a standard £10 per image. Now for a small use on a blog that's a high price compared to purchasing from a Micro site. However, the standard Picfair license doesn't offer any variations so that £10 image could just as easily be used on the front page of a National newspaper.

Ideally, I'd like to experiment with different price points to see if that makes a difference to sales, however what Picfair currently lacks is a global price change facility (unlike FineArtAmerica where you can reset your entire portfolio pricing with one click). You can, of course, edit your pricing image by image but there is no way I am doing that 870 times! I could try just changing the pricing on some images but I am really loathe to set up a two tier system suggesting that "these are my best ones at £10 and this is a bit rubbish at £2".

So, for now I am persisting with Picfair. It is still fairly early days for them as a business and I see no reason why the site will not gradually attract more buyers -especially given the fantastic quality of many of the images being submitted. The batch upload is quick and efficient (and they now offer FTP on request to those that want that -I don't) so they do not represent a big demand on my time to keep uploading. Hopefully, I'll have some sales news to report in the not too distant future. Regards, David. EDIT: Click on the comments below for a response from Picfair :)

Pro's: Choose your own pricing/No reviews/Prospects for growth
Con's: No global price change/ Uploading no longer works on IE9 (a minor gripe and maybe just me)

ShootingStock revamp:

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed some changes in the last few days as I have revamped the site with a whole new template. So here we are then with ShootingStock version 3.0 (or to be truthful more like 3.1 as I have already made a few adjustments).
Anyone looking at my Greek island blog will quickly spot that I have used the same template as that one (albeit with some customisation and some different page elements).
Blogger.com offer a whole range of templates and styles to choose from but I felt this one worked best for both. In fact, the revamp was actually a little premature as I was just trying to see what different templates might look like. I hadn't realised that clicking "apply to blog" would be an ireversible decision - I was expecting a "save" option later. Actually there may well be but I failed to find it while trying to get the blog back to its previous look until I was ready. At several points I ended up with a confused looking mess with all my regular links and info missing and a rather disgusting looking orange colour scheme.
Now really old regular readers will know that back in 2008 I launched this blog with just that colour. It was never a concious choice -that's just how the original template came (and I had no idea then that you could fully customise just about everything, or maybe you couldn't then?).
Back to the present day and a rather frantic period ensued while I tried to get everything looking how I wanted (well aware that the site was live while I was doing this).
Anyway, here it is in its third incarnation. I hope you like it and feel free to comment by clicking on the comments link below this post. Regards, David.

January Updates:

After the Christmas slowdown, the new year got off to a flying start. Best month ever on Shutterstock with 72 downloads ($22.94) and a BDE of 14 downloads. Meanwhile, another milestone as my SS portfolio passed 700 images.

Over at Dreamstime I had 13 downloads ($9.64) bringing my total sales there to 52 since joining.

Bigstockphoto continued its flurry of sales with a further 5 downloads (most of which were my archive politician images -the General Election is coming soon in the UK so I am expecting my political images to show an increase in sales).

Istockphoto brought 4 downloads ($3.10) of which two were my first sales on "Partner Programme" site Photos.com.

And Yay! Finally had another sale at Yaymicro (o.5 Euros). Well it all helps! What was pleasing was that it was one of my Editorial images (Poll Tax riots in London). So hopefully my Editorial there is starting to get some attention.

Nothing yet from Mostphoto, but I've only uploaded 23 images to them so far so no surpise there. British site Picturenation also zero but they have only been back online for a couple of weeks. However, lots of new images accepted on PN with some lightning quick reviews (including my fastest ever approval -about 30 seconds after submission! They were obviously reviewing my batch as I was adding captions and submitting. It started to feel like a bit of a race at one point).

Meanwhile at 123RF my trial Editorial submission got reviewed and all were accepted (11). There was a delay there as I wasn't previously signed up to them. Turned out that they were not set up for people joining with just Editorial images. One of their people was posting on the Microstockgroup.com forum so I queried why mine were still waiting approval. Pleased to say that they dealt with it within a day or so. Looking forward to uploading a load more ahead of their forthcoming Editorial launch. Regards, David.