The Pixmac microstock agency is proud to announce that we now offer 7 million stock photos for our customers. Only a few competitors can say the same. Our collection consists of 3 sources. Two are creative and one editorial called “Celebrity”. Pixmac is the fastest way to get a stock photo or illustration for your design for a price that might surprise you.

When the pink company launched its marketplace in September 2008 it might have seemed like just another microstock company that is trying to make it. But look how much we have grown in a year! Pixmac has partners in 9 major markets and its sales are growing faster than expected.

Our company is  growing faster than other competitors in the microstock market according to respected site Alexa.com and  the amount of pictures grows with it. Not only that, Pixmac invented the “One Stop Shopping” way to get inexpensive quality photos in a matter of seconds without need of registration. Lee Torrens, a well known microstock blogger, says: “I LOVE your one-stop-shopping idea! It has always been a missing element of microstock agencies…” Yes, Pixmac focuses on speed and user friendliness.

Pixmac offers a lot now and has more in the oven to offer our customers. For example, Pixmac is working with a University on a project that will change your searching abilities and will make searching quicker and easier. We are also adding another few million photos to the database soon and working on some nice stock photo searching tweaks.

This week we’re launching a new updated website together with features such as Moneybookers payment method which added with payments by PayPal and/or  Credit Card. Also we have included a popular feature that sorts search results by downloads or date.

Vitezslav Valka (CEO) comments: “I’m always thrilled to see our customers happy with the user interface. Everybody deserves an easy tool that just works. I’m watching everything that happens in the company and believe me, it’s better than Red Bull and Duracell together!”

And one last thing for insiders. Watch our Twitter for special offers!

Our portfolio is growing pretty fast! We have now launched editorial content at Pixmac. If you ever need fresh photos of famous singers or actors, just jump on Pixmac! The celebrity section at Pixmac already has 300,000 pictures to download from $2 each. They’re ready for your blog, postcard, print, etc. And you know what’s better? Every day more than 10,000 new photos added!

We’re also participating in developing a new celebrity portal. Want to know what Paris Hilton or Brad Pitt did yesterday? Read Everyceleb.com every day!

We’ve also added great new functions for you! So now Pixmac is even easier for you to use.

Multiple operations

We’ve improved multiple operations for photographers. Now it’s really simple to work with multiple photos, add releases or a title to them.

Public lightboxes

Have you found beautiful photos and you want to show them to your friends? We’ve made public lightboxes for you. How does it work? It’s easy. Create a new lightbox and add your favorite pictures to it. Choose the “Show lightbox URL” option. Copy the URL and send it to your friends.

Zoom photos

Now you can zoom photos from Pixmac collection. Just click on the photo to zoom to 100%. Perfect for those who want to check the quality of the original.

Czech version

Pixmac launches Pixmac in Czech this week. In the near future we are planning to launch also other language versions. Almost done is Russian, German, Spanish, Portugese, Italian.

And one last thing. Because of our contract with Fotolia we had to lower the commision for non-exclusive rights to 30% and to 40% for exclusive rights for new photographers coming to Pixmac.

Pixmac announces its first giveaway! Just post your affiliate link in comments. After we reach 200 comments, we will give 50 credits to one of you. Its that easy! Anyway, why should you get gifts only on Christmas and maybe birthday?

Taking part in this giveaway is pretty easy. We’re happy when seeing a lot of comments here. And you can be happy if we reach at least 200 comments in this post with the affliliate link! Its your turn now! Spread the word and help yourself! Its Jackpot time right after we reach 200 or more comments!

Example:

Hi there! I’m Jane from New York and my link is: #Jane

Remeber: If you don’t win now, it may make sense for you to watch our blog via RSS. In the future more giveaways may be coming! Anyway, thank you for participation!

Rules: Credit wins one of the customers or photographers who add their Affiliate code (number or nick with the “#” symbol) into this post. The deadline for giving the 50 credits to one of you is 200 comments. Then we will post the name of the randomly chosen winner here in the post. The winner gets $50 equivalent in Pixmac credits. This credit can be used for photos, illustrations and other graphics from Pixmac collection.

As everybody out there already know Facebook is a platform for not only meeting people, but much more sharing their lives. That’s why Pixmac became a “user” too.

Why we did that? It is simple. Basically we want people to know that we’re listening. So almost everything we do is for users. We want to hear them and act as they like that. We like to share how Pixmac is going, and so. For us whole online universe is an inspiration space. We can discuss usability issues, read user feedback and feel the same you feel. That is finally transformed to a better tool – better Pixmac.

Professional designers, as others, sometimes need a rest. They take a job for a non-profit organization or do a favor for their friend. When there is a need for a photo, Pixmac can help to keep the budget as low as possible. As one forum said: “The best free pictures available on the net…”

The best thing is, that the collection is here for you to use. You can register at Pixmac any time, and pay nothing for hundreds of free photos. Also you can look for some other themes in our collection of millions low-budget pictures of high quality ones from 0.1 Megapixel up to 16 Megapixels.

Another good thing is the speed and comfort. Pixmac is made to serve you photos. That is its purpose and that is why there are pictures easily available. Without any marketing text which just disturbs you, even without pop-up windows and blinking banners. Nothing like this at Pixmac.

Thanks to all this, the collection is growing every day. Now we have covered almost every aspect of your personal and business life, so you can find anything you need just by clicking: Search. Isn’t that easy?

We at Pixmac hope, that you will be satisfied or we will be contacted right away!

Specialists say that the usual software will become history soon. The new era of using a computer connected to internet just with a browser is closer than we might think. Let’s jump into the future and experience online image editing right now!

Pixlr

A fast and easy to use application just like Photoshop on your desktop. I’ts unbelievable that it runs so fast, without registration and has so many functions. These swedish guys have same targets as we at Pixmac. Making a good tool is the primary vision for both. And, their name starts with “Pix” as Pixmac The only bad thing is that you cannot save your pictures with layers.

Pixlr homepage: www.pixlr.com
Pixlr application: www.pixlr.com/app

Splashup

This was for few months, the number one in online image editing. The good thing Splashup has the possibility to connect to image posting sites like Flickr, Facebook or Picasa. And also, you can save your images if you’re registered user or use a Light version if you don’t want to learn all those fuctions of the full version.

Splashup homepage: www.splashup.com

Picnik

The third application is a bit too compliacted to use. It has similar functions as Splashup above, but it is more focused to the enduser and to young people. It seems more like added value for social sites users rather than a bitmap picture editor. Additionaly, there is a premium version with some more functions for a small payment.

Picnik homepage: www.picnik.com

Photoshop Online

This is a real Photoshop thing. Ok, ok, not a complete Photoshop online, but a clean tool from the makers of the Photoshop – the Adobe company. This piece is similar to Picnik but packed in a much better interface. It is a easy and simple tool to make few corrections with your photo, nothing more.

Photoshop homepage: www.photoshop.com

Summary

These apps prove the theory about user migration from standalone apps to online world. The editors are not that good and fast as a real Photoshop or GIMP in your computer, but they definitely will take a piece of cake. The world is changing in front of our eyes! Be ready to jump in!

There are some smaller apps like:

Foto Flexer: www.fotoflexer.com
Phixr: www.phixr.com
Snipshot: www.snipshot.com

Every day at Pixmac is an adventure. We are looking for new ways of how to satisfy Pixmac users. We already know that this is not the easy way, but we don’t want to be just a usual microstock agency. Pixmac will be the innovative & user-friendly tool always working for you.

To be honest, we have a pretty long list of things to include into Pixmac. But we also want to have the website clean and easy to use. So we have chosen a few big issues to solve. Below is the list sorted by our priority. If you think of anything else, feel free to comment this post.

1. More languages (Spanish, French, German, Czech)

As you may know, there are not just English speaking people as you are. That is why we started to translate Pixmac into more languages and we are still working on new ones. Watch the Pixmac website every day, they will appear.

2. Advanced Search (Addition for precise search)

Usually people don’t need it. But you know, sometimes there is a need for some tweaks. So we listened to our users and prepared a marvelous tool to make your search even better.

3. Subscription (Better prices for repetitive customers)

This is something for the buyers. People who need a lot of pictures usually deserve a better price. So we made this a reality in just a few months after Pixmac was launched. Isn’t it great?

4. Refferal program (Make money with us)

One of the most wanted feature of almost any microstock website is a referral program. It stitches the community together and offers the ability to make some money to everybody involved.

5. New payment methods (Phone, SMS, Debit Card)

We love the colors of the world. And we want to make those of you who don’t want your Credit Card to be exposed happy. That is why there are some new methods of payment prepared for you in our labs.

Design Federation is a group of people oriented on design and new media. They wrote an article mentioning some interesting microstock agencies and Pixmac was one of them.

For Pixmac, this is good news. Everyday we are working hard to bring you the best tool for selling or buying photos. And this type of article shows that we are heading to the right direction. In the article the positives were a clear message to us:

Here you can find many high quality pictures which i have not seen on any other microsite. The site is very quick and easy to work with and the price levels rank among the lowest on the microstock market. They also have quite big thumbnails which i appreciate.

The only negative was the lack of advanced searching. But that is a thing we are already cooking in our kitchen. We hope that this, and a couple of other new features will pop-up shortly on Pixmac website.

More at Design Federation (November 12th, 2008)