My goal is to find the copyright owner and point the buyer to them.

I am a photographer and have been funding PicturEngine for years on my own, and no we are not making a profit.  Hopefully, one day we will.  We only started accepting money last November, anyone before then was and on a free trial.  I have not received a paycheck or compensation since before I shut my agencies down in 2014, and pushing all of my photographers onto the PicturEngine platform to receive 100% of the sale.  I built PicturEngine for all of us because it is the right thing to do, and I believe I have the team to do it. The only shareholders in PicturEngine are friends, family, and dedicated developers.  Our passion and mission is to help photographers from the grassroots up.  Together, we will succeed.

Now with that out of the way.  We are deduping (removing exact duplicates) as fast as we can, always looking for fraudsters in violation of copyright.  If you recall, several years ago we were seeing images listed on PicturEngine as both RM and RF from stock photo sites, we worked with photographers and agencies to clean these up.  Agencies do not have the data to reach across the industry of a billion images to do what we are doing, much less work together to find an amicable solution to the problem.  I decided it was best to work with agencies not against them.  Verifying identity is critical.  We are always looking for mismatches in identity in our search results and when in doubt we don't show the image in our search results (or remove it as soon as we can.)  Our system is not perfect, but I believe PicturEngine is the best shot we've got in the industry for sustainability.   It would be so much easier if all agencies required the copyright owner to use a real name and not a pseudonym.

I was not trying to be critical of any new players in the industry, just sincerely wanted to know the answers to my questions.  If they have a better way, GREAT!  We can work together to find the answers and solve the problems as they come.

I think this is interesting and relevant to our conversation about the search engine business model we are having on this thread.  Over the years Google has added more paid advertising space and less organic to its search results pages. 

https://moz.com/blog/google-organic-clicks-shifting-to-paid

This practice is all too common in the world of search engines, and it teaches us that paid content will in the future be the only way to be found.  Organic site content that comes up will only be the most significant and specialized in that particular subject. 

This is precisely why we do not want to allow a bidding ranked system on PicturEngine for our paid results.  I want to let the image buyers choose what they want to see in their specific search results.  Why I decided to spend the resources on our suggestion engine and learning image search.  We want the best image for that buyer to come up in their results, not the users' that can pay the most.

The world is changing around us.  We need to be agile and adapt to that change.  Thank you all for your suggestions on how to make the industry more sustainable.  Please keep them coming.   

It would help if you put the total number of images found on the first page but then I suppose that makes buyers realise there isn't as much to look at as there are on some sites and your USP for them has gone?

Providing a count of total images from a search that learns, adapts, grows and shrinks as you act upon it, was not practical.  The image results count (or totals) continuously change as you act, click, etc., the search results are not supposed to end until you find what it is you are looking for. 

As more users search, click, act and train our engine, smarter (better) it gets at inferring the meaning in words entered to search.  We are not there yet, but that's what we are striving to create. 

"Yes, your images are probably already in our organic search results if they are listed with an agency.  Using our paid Advertising or Platform replaces your images within our search results, and sends the buyer straight to your site or selling page where you make/keep more money."

I think the project is intriguing on a number of levels but after looking at your pricing plans I am confused by your business model. As mentioned in a previous reply, offering lower rates to agencies than to individuals does seem to contradict one of your expressed goals. The real confusion for me though is in your advertising only packages. For instance, let's say that I as an individual wanted to leverage your advertising to drive sales to a specific stock site that offered higher commissions or to increase my ranking there, how does your algorithm handle conflicts between two or more paying advertisers? In other words, if your platform gains popularity to the point where it disrupts agency sales what is stopping agencies from advertising alongside contributors. Since the majority of us contribute to multiple agencies how exactly would that work? Furthermore, how would/does it handle conflicts between paying contributors for similar searches?

First, see our public FAQs
http://picturengine.desk.com/customer/en/portal/articles/524043-am-i-competing-with-my-agencies-
http://picturengine.desk.com/customer/en/portal/articles/478867-does-picturengine-compare-prices-

When an image is ingested into PicturEngine, we start with a deduping process (removing or ranking the exact duplicate image.)  Our industry is full of duplication BOTH from agencies and photographers syndicating (sending the same image to multiple sources.) It is important that we do not allow agencies to compete on price, so we only want to show the image once in our search results. 
We use a scale from 0-10.  With "0" represented as licensing directly from the creator/copyright holder, either on our PicturEngine Platform or Advertising Only (on the photographers' sales and delivery platform.) When an image is marked as direct to the creator "0" we default and only show this image to the buyers. If an agency is paying for advertising, the lowest they can get is a "1" on this scale.  We use a formula to try and determine the "base" agency for a particular image the lower number on the scale gets shown to the buyer.  We had to come up with a system because we found the same image at several agencies and also direct from the creator.  I don't want to make a super long post, let me know if you need further explanation, (there are many calculations that go into deciding the 1-10 ranking of agencies on a per image basis.)

At the moment it looks as though your site only returns one page of results for any of the search terms I input, however what happens when that expands to ten, or a hundred, or a thousand? I know if I am paying the same amount for exposure as my competitors then I don't want page 20 or even page 2. I want number 1 page 1. So then what? Sort by popularity, relevance, new? I get that for free already. Maybe by rotation then? I suspect I get that for free already too, so the only thing I can see if the platform takes off is a pay for placement auction scheme similar to Google adwords. Is that correct?

Forgive my skepticism but I like to know what I am actually getting before I spend my money. By the way, are you aware your splash page explicitly states "PicturEngine features unbiased searches"? You should probably remove that.

The search results are listed as an infinite scroll. When you search for a particular term, you receive a set of results; we load about 100 images at a time.  As you (the buyer searching) act on the search results, click on images, add images to a lightbox, etc. our system is listening and learning what you like to see in your search results and can then suggest images in the next load of results as you scroll.  Think of our search as a big funnel starting wide at the top and narrowing as you act on the results and we learn what you like seeing.

The goal is a smart, learning image search where no one can pay to have higher results (no auction type mechanism, as that, won't benefit the creator or buyer) Instead we try and determine the best result for that person searching.  Giving a shuffled result of both organic and paid results giving the buyer the best search experience possible. 

On the flip side, we also want to give creators data as to how their images are performing, and what they can do to improve.  The good images (for that particular search/subject) should rise, and the not so good ones fall, let the buyers actions decide.

We are always interested in feedback that's why I started this thread.

You can please some of the people, some of the time, @Semmick Photo and @sharpshot. 

We learn from our mistakes and are evolving and adapting to the current changes in our industry.

When I started PicturEngine, I knew our industry was not sustainable in its current direction.  I am working toward a solution for our collective future.

So the '500 images' relates to - how many images are on my site? Or how many links I get? Or how many sales I get?

Number of Images.

Select the total number of images you want us to represent in the drop-down. http://www.picturengine.com/#pricing-plans
We are evolving, listening to the needs of creators and offer a new tiered pricing structure for our Photographer Platform.

Sorry for the long responses.  I feel it is often useful to understand my thinking; this hopefully gives you a better understanding of what we are doing and why. 

I am creating a better, smarter, learning image search.
We are a search engine and marketplace. We have to pay for the smart search somehow, so we have broken it up into parts to benefit creators.   

Search engines traditionally operate on advertising revenue.  Take a look at Google, (NOT Google images) paid vs. organic search results.  (Google Images does not make Google money directly YET, but that is an entirely different and long topic.)

The current search engine PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising models do not work to benefit smaller creators in our industry.  These models reward those with the most money to advertise for paid search or the sites with the best SEO for organic traffic (usually the ones with the money to pay for PPC.)  On Google, advertising clicks for searches such as "Insurance" pay as much as $55 per click!  Individual contributors to the stock photo industry cannot support these high PPC prices and would not/do not use it.  In Google, and other search engines, Large agencies win every time, and the money to do PPC advertising eventually comes from your reduced commissions and further lowering prices to compete with other agencies.
   
We needed to be more creative in our approach to advertising and think about how we can benefit the creators.  Our smart, learning search and suggestion engine decides the location and placement of the search results (as stated previously,) like shuffling cards, but the deck is not random.  We let the buyers choose the arrangement of images using our internal ranking score.   

The goal is to help creators make better decisions, by giving them data, on how their images perform and providing insights into the industry, etc.. This is something agencies do not do.  I want to do this in real-time.

We try to push the keyword spammers in both organic and paid search down in the search results. We grade images per image buyers needs, and per keyword, image, collection and also added a visual component to check for relevancy of keywords and content.  It is my ultimate goal not to need keywords attached to images for image search but that is a couple of years off.   

NOTE to photographers: If you are searching for a random word that you "loaded" in your images keywords, (not in the dictionary or on the map) to specifically find your images, it is probably not searchable on PicturEngine, or if it is, it won't be for long.  Also if you are searching for your name, we also try to remove that from the searchable content (unless you are selling direct.)  We do this to prevent price comparisons. 

It has taken me and my team years designing and developing our search to listen to the cues of image buyers.  It is not perfect and is getting better with every search.  With that said, we have to be very selective in who we let train our engine, and we had to put qualifiers in place.  We discovered some undesirable results (the hard way) when everyone (not just image buyers) was allowed to teach our engine. 
Example: Images across many subjects began to rise prematurely due to clicking on images to see details or larger images.  i.e. we saw pictures of "waterfall" at the top of our search results start to have more girls with bikinis in them, not the desired result we were seeking.  We needed to adjust our ranking techniques; this is all a learning process.  We are solving the issues in search and ranking as they come, deciding who can and cannot train our engine. 

Yes, some undesirable results will show for a few searches, we try to catch them and adjust, in time they will be filtered and ranked lower where other more relevant images will rise to the top.

The photographer platform is a full-service platform (created and used by my agencies for many years) it includes everything you need for licensing photos (and more) plus the advertising component.
Photographers asked for it, so we provided it as an option.  The only thing the platform does not give is a front facing website to represent your shooting work.  Other platforms like PhotoShelter and PhotoDeck do an excellent job of making websites.  I did not want to focus on website customization and instead focus on a better image search. 

More on that here:http://picturengine.desk.com/customer/en/portal/topics/187968-photographer-platform/articles
I am trying to keep my post here shorter.

Yes, your images are probably already in our organic search results if they are listed with an agency.  Using our paid Advertising or Platform replaces your images within our search results, and sends the buyer straight to your site or selling page where you make/keep more money. 

With enough support, we can further enable creators to continue to create. 
Tell me, are you happy with the current state of the industry?  If not, what can we change to make it better?

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.

I think most buyers seem reluctant to use more than one or two sites.  That's why I never got too enthusiastic about Symbiostock, it looks like buyers don't like signing up to many sites or we would see the smaller sites doing much better.  I presume that with PictureEngine, if they found 20 photos they wanted on 20 different sites, they would have to sign up to all of them?  I just don't see how that will work.  Then there's price.  Not much point finding what they want on PictureEngine only to find its not the right price.  What about quality control?  All the sites have different standards, some buyers might be OK with images that are on the sites with almost no review standards but I'm sure many wouldn't be.

If you can sell images from all the sites with only one sign up, standardise prices and make sure all the low quality old images that really shouldn't be on some of the sites were excluded, PictureEngine might be a good idea but then you would still have to convince buyers and that doesn't seem easy.

We are talking about multiple subjects here, so I will try not to make this too long.
First, PicturEngine is a search engine.  Our focus is providing a better image search than what is currently available.  We want to help image buyers find the perfect image for them.  With the stock photography industry so saturated with images, finding ONE image to represent a buyer�s unique business or product is challenging.  The more users search on PicturEngine, showing us what they like, the more relevant images float to the top and irrelevant images sink to the bottom.  I am not going into the mechanics details here, although we employ a lot more than keywords, using our ranking algorithms to weigh individual images visually.

Think about Google, and all of the content indexed, yet they make it all searchable.  They try to make the best most relevant content come to the top.  People searching tell them what is relevant and what is not, by their actions.  Like all search engines (Google, Bing, etc), there is an organic and paid search (paid advertisements- Adwords, Bing Ads).  Unlike these search engines (that have been found to enable or help users to find and steal great images, PicturEngine refers the buyer to the SOURCE where the image can be licensed.  We don�t show the images too big and we ONLY search licensable content.  It is our job to give ALL those looking to license an image a great place to search and find the perfect image for them.
 
"I think most buyers seem reluctant to use more than one or two sites.�
PicturEngine is a search engine as stated above.  We offer a �Platform" and an �Advertising Only� plan, both to help photographers get their images seen by a larger audience.  With that said, the PicturEngine Platform is nothing like Symbiostock.  We don�t build photographers an individual website because buyers won�t come to an individual website unless you have a massive amount of AMAZING content, updated regularly, and actively advertise to be seen by buyers.  As an agency owner with just under a million images between my two niche agencies, it is really hard to get buyers to regularly come to an individual site.  I spent tens of thousands of dollars every year on advertising to get buyers to come take a look, and we had great niches, amazing images of released houses and Caribbean travel, just not enough to get them coming back every time they needed a fresh image.  This is WHY I built PicturEngine, to help individual photographers and small agencies affordably stay in this business and make money creating and licensing stock imagery.  Please do check out all of the features our platform provides.   http://support.picturengine.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2562568-photographer-platform-features-list

"If you can sell images from all the sites with only one sign up"  If you are talking about a single sign on and license for ALL of the agencies and platforms of the industry, I don�t see that happening.  But, if you want to license 20 different images, from 20 different photographers on the PicturEngine Platform, that�s EASY!  We have just ONE login, ONE checkout, ONE payment, and ALL of the photographers are paid 100% of their sale instantly.  PicturEngine handles invoicing and content delivery.  If that�s what you want, we built that.  Think of it as Amazon or eBay for our industry; one cart, many sellers.  As for pricing, we do give our platform photographers crowdsourced pricing suggestions, but it is up to them to price their own images.  If a buyer does not agree with the price you have set, they can always click "Make an Offer" using our automated system, then you can accept, counter offer, or decline.  It�s pretty simple.  My team and I have built agencies before.  We have all the standard tools available to an agency and much more, all at your fingertips.

I suppose you could compare our PicturEngine "Advertising Only" plan to Symbiostock, where we allow a photographer with his or her own platform (that meets our base criteria) to participate and be placed as advertising in our search results.  This would be a fair comparison.

"What about quality control?"
Our focus is on a quality image search.  Just like Google, we don�t discriminate, we include all.  We are searching our organic content, our advertisers, and the industry�s top stock agencies in near real-time.  We let the buyer�s actions tell us what they want to see more.  The best image search is our goal, and is our focus, we are way beyond just keywords.  If we find that a particular photographer or agency is trying to game the system to get higher in the search results, or just has a bunch of images that are undesirable or not licensable, our search is designed to let those images sink.  So far our search thinks people coming from Microstock Group want to see kangaroos with black borders.

How about a payment model where you keep the first 30$ of the photographer's sale? That should also motivate you to do something about getting good sales for your contributors.

We would rather pay you 100% of the sale, keeping it simple with a flat fee.  This keeps the overhead on our end low, where we never have to worry about the tracking or reporting of which account is paid etc.  Keeping our system simple is the plan, as our focus is on image search and not accounting.  Although, we do have accounting, sales tracking, sales reports, etc in your individual account on the PicturEngine Platform.  Photographers and image buyers we interviewed said too many times they essentially circumvent or "go around" the platforms they are currently on, to avoid paying even 8% (eight percent) of the sale or the smallest processing fee just to save money.  We would rather give the incentive for our users to actually USE the system we have built, with all of the protections and rights tracking included. We automatically embed in your images' metadata your proper copyright statement, contact info, including the license details in the PLUS LDF (license data format) for you, after each sale and just prior to your image being downloaded by the image buyer.  We provide so many tools that we want photographers to use for their OWN protection.

As for image size, once I click the thumbnail and I get some basic info presented, I can't click the image and see it bigger which I feel is a natural thing to do as a buyer. I don't want to click "License image" just to see it bigger, as I am not ready to license it.

Similar to a Google search, if you want to read more than what is displayed in the 2 lines available in the search results, you click to see the full site.  We do not store the images, just the link to the images where they can be licensed.  The action of clicking to see more information, adding the image to a lightbox, or licensing an image also tells us what you are looking for when you search a specific term and makes your results better.  Our algorithms will change as we mature, our search will improve with more users telling us what they like and don�t like seeing.

the $30 a month is significant. FineArtAmerica charges $30 a YEAR, and some have balked at that. I don't think its a modal that I can get excited about, but I wish you all the best with it.

I understand completely, PicturEngine is not for everyone.  I like to remind people that not everyone uses (or pays for) Google Adwords, or Bing ads, to draw traffic to their website, but these advertisements pay for the rest of us to use search engines for free.  PicturEngine works on the same principal.  Think of it as a cross between Google, Amazon, and eBay.  If you take advantage of what all the PicturEngine Platform has to offer, many photographers think it is a bargain.

Hi Microstock Group,

PicturEngine is ready!

We built something so many said could not be done. Together, we're putting control of image distribution and commissions back into photographers� hands where it rightfully belongs.

PicturEngine is released to the public with a few features disabled. To turn on all the bells and whistles, visual search, More Like This, real-time search deduping, phone and tablet front-end formatting, and more, we must first get PicturEngine to the market.

I encourage you to check out the new system at http://www.picturengine.com/. Please note that search results will fluctuate over the next few weeks as we prepare for our public campaign and bring new data online.  We take photographers' suggestions very seriously, and we're here to ensure everything runs smoothly.  If you discover an issue, or have feedback of any kind, please let us know what you think at [email protected].  Updated FAQs are available at http://support.picturengine.com/ 

I hope you are as excited as I am about this tremendous milestone.

If you are new to PicturEngine here is a quick summary:

Advertising, Sales and Delivery platform
� Showcase your work to a larger audience
� Level playing field thanks to unbiased search results
� Exclusive tools and analytics help get your best images online fast
� Pay only a simple flat fee and keep 100% of your sales
� First SIX months FREE!

Advertising Only
If you already have a sales platform, take advantage of an Advertising Only plan.
� Include your images within our industry-wide search results
� We point buyers to your images where you make the sales
� Flat fee, zero commissions
� First month FREE!

Best,
JB

I recommend BitCasa to all of my photographers.  I have been using them since 2011 for keeping an offsite copy of images.  I also use BackBlaze on my desktop computers and laptops.

https://www.bitcasa.com/
Free for 10GB
-10GB storage / backup
-Access anywhere
-Keep your data safe

OR
$99/year Or $10/month
-Infinite storage / backup
-Infinite file version history
-Chat & email support*
-Access anywhere
-Keep your data safe

Best,
JB

PicturEngine is in open photographer beta, meaning that we're not yet open to the public.  The purpose of beta is testing the site, looking for areas of improvement, bug fixes, etc.  We are actively asking for feedback from photographers in an effort to make PicturEngine the best it can be BEFORE advertising publicly.  We do NOT compare prices, period.  I apologize that one word on one page of our website led some people to believe otherwise, despite numerous other places which clearly articulate the fact that we do NOT compare prices.  We have updated the page in question to more clearly state the fact that we do NOT compare prices.  Thank you very much for bringing this concern to our attention.  We greatly appreciate constructive, professional, and productive criticism/feedback, which will enable us to more quickly complete the beta process and launch publicly.  Again, thank you.  If you find any other inconsistencies, please email our support center so we can review the issue and get it resolved.


Best,

JB