Are you happy with the current direction of the industry?  What needs to change?  Where do you see the future?  What do you consider our industries biggest problems? 

Many of you know who I am, and what I am doing.  I have posted here before about what I do to try and solve some of the industries problems.  I am working on perfecting a better, smarter, learning, and predictive image search.  I have also opened my past agencies enterprise-level sales and delivery platform to photographers, giving 100% of the license fee they set, for a flat fee to run the system.

I wanted to comment on some trends am following, many resulting in my current direction, I hope to receive your constructive feedback, and see what we can do together to make things better for all of us. 

Content creation in our industry is growing exponentially.  Now that just about everyone with a camera in his or her pocket, anyone can create content for our industry.  Yes, I know it takes more than a �smart camera� to take great photos. However, the barriers to entry into the stock photo market space continue to decline.  Image quality continues to improve, and finding the best (most relevant) images to represent a company, product, brand or idea will continue to vex image buyers.  Manual image curation is not enough, and cannot possibly predict the future market need.  I built my first stock photo agency Corner House Stock Photo on the inadequacies of stock photo agency curation.  I took on released houses and home lifestyle images that other photo agencies turned away; we filled a niche others did not see.  I am an architecture shooter and had direct insight into what real buyers in the space wanted and were looking for, which the other agencies did not see. 

With this influx of new stock photo content, oversupply and competition, agencies have even less of an incentive to take on additional out of scope images that may or may not sell.  It appears that the �new" plan or trend, is to allow buyers to request content on demand.  On-demand content is nothing new, look up the history of On Request Images and others following the same model like ImageBrief.  Yes, we can hear it straight from the horse's mouth what buyers are "looking for" when they put out a request or brief.  However shooting such content with a single consumer's particular product or service in mind, on speck is risky business for the image creator, locking up their time on creating images for one buyer.  Yes, the request can be expanded upon and shot for other subjects. The short version - In my opinion retrying old failed business models, is NOT a good "new" plan for the future.

My focus has been on a smarter, learning and predictive image search.  A search that is all-inclusive, and lets the image buyer decide what they want to see and we simply show them more of what they want and less of what they don't.  The search engine model works, we use it every day for other industries, why not stock photos?   It is time to embrace the technology that is pushing our industry into the future.  Use machine learning and artificial intelligence to help buyers find images and help photographers get images licensed.  I am the first to say that my system is not perfect, we have had our fair share of growing pains, but it is getting better, faster and smarter every day.  With enough data, we can predict cycles and trends sharing this information with image creators.  It all depends on how you use the massive amount of data collected and available.  I am actively working on this. 

Let me know where you see the future.  Is this a problem that can or needs to be solved?  How?  Do you think search and data derived from search can help us or are we better off in our current path guessing and shooting in the dark? I am open to your constructive thoughts.