Best Business Practices for Photographers [228]
PhotoShelter currently offers a cross-photographer search result from their own PhotoShelter.com portal, and they show any image that has been marked as publicly searchable.
Photographers can also selectively group together and create a "Virtual Agency." This is designed to give a group of photographers one common archive for marketing purposes (with the idea that there is strength in numbers), but when an image is sold, the buyer deals directly with the photographer, and no "agency" takes a cut of the sale. As a PhotoShelter member, you can opt into their Virtual Agency service—which is free—and your images will be shown during search queries. PhotoShelter continues to evolve and grow this offering, with new images and features that make it easy to use. For example, the members of SportsShooter.com, a popular photography website, have created their own Virtual Agency, which allows them to have a searchable image archive of member images, complete with e-commerce, with no technical knowledge or accounting at all.
Famed nature and wildlife photographers Art Wolfe, Thomas Mangelsen, and David Doubilet have joined together to form WILD Photography using PhotoShelter's Virtual Agency product, and they have stopped submitting their images to larger agencies, such as Getty Images.
"Neither the buyer nor the photographer has been well-served by existing agencies," said Art Wolfe. "We can provide a deeper and wider collection from our long careers and license them for less than the big agencies thanks to low overhead and a higher percentage going to us. With PhotoShelter's platform powering WILD, everybody wins."
Among PhotoShelter's 40,000+ clients are organizations such as Contact Press Images, Major League Baseball, the San Francisco 49ers, the Oakland A's, the Seattle Seahawks, as well as the Eddie Adams Workshop.
PhotoShelter contains an e-commerce capability and continues to evolve it in response to client and photo-buyer feedback. You can also opt in to offer images as prints—you set the pricing for the images, and PhotoShelter does the fulfillment, or you can opt to handle it yourself. You can also license your images as Rights-Managed using the integrated fotoQuote pricing grid. They also give you the ability to sell Personal Use licenses, which are digital downloads, usually at a slightly lower resolution, that cannot be republished or resold by the end user. (This is perfect for someone who wants to use an image as their computer desktop wallpaper.)
They have a free account that allows you to store 150 MB worth of images, but to really get the most out of their product, you'll need to step up to a paid account. Monthly fees begin at less than $10 (for their Basic plan) and increase as the amount of data you have online increases. If you'd like to customize the look and feel to match your own website or access their collection of premade website templates, you'll need to sign up for the Standard package at $29.99/month. They do not have an annual commitment requirement, they don't make you sign any contracts, and they don't charge you any setup fees.
There are price discounts available if you are willing to pay for a year at a time. Readers of this book can take advantage of a few special offers by entering this special code during signup:
ps6ZTNJH3T
Annual Basic Account - $109.00/year; Annual PhotoShelter Standard Account -Save 10% - $319.00/year; Annual Pro Account Special - Save $60! - $539.00/year.