Many of you searching for photos were confused with credits, our virtual currency. Pixmac has solved that now for you. You don’t have to learn what credit is and you even don’t have to register at Pixmac if you need just one picture.

This idea came up from our research that most buyers are searching for just one picture first. Usually they realise later that Pixmac is so easy that they can use it twice or more times! The second thing is most users don’t have time. When they’re in a hurry and they don’t have time to learn how the credit system works. Or perhaps they don’t have the time to register at Pixmac. And finally they don’t wanna purchase more credits just because they may not use them in the future.

Our solution? One Stop Shopping.

You can just search for picture you need, click the download button, pay the price and that’s it! Your project and your life is saved. We’ve saved some electricity, you can take more time to watch the wildlife out of your office window. And if you want a better price, then credits are there for you!

Lee Torrens says: “I LOVE your one-stop-shopping idea! It has always been a missing element of microstock agencies so I’m very glad to see you leading the way with this. I imagine there’s a minor loss of leads through not collecting email addresses, but as the market reaches further toward less sophisticated buyers, I expect this easy transaction style will be particularly handy. Great work!” – More about Lee at Microstock Diaries

It is as easy as 1-2-3

You’ll need 3 minutes to have the picture on your disk.

1. Search for the desired picture in the Pixmac stock photo gallery and click on it.
2. Choose the required size and click on Download.
3. Pay for the picture via PayPal or Credit Card. That is it!

We are browsing websites all the time to find useful tools that can help our users to work with their images. Recently we have found some applications that can be worth trying – tools for invisible watermarking, searching for those invisible watermarks online and debluring and denoising images. We are in contact with Filip Krolupper – the leader of developers of those applications so we have asked him several questions.

What is the history of Advanced Photo Tools?
Everything begun with the application SignMyImage 1.0 that was released approx. a year ago. In four months the application got rid of childrens diseases and the version 2.0 was released. In the same time the first version of Image Spider was employed. Image Spider is a web crawler responsible for searching signed images.

In the meantime we developed image denoising tool called DenoiseMyImage.

In this time we have two professional applications and we are about releasing the third application for image debluring – DeblurMyImage.
In the beginning the project was one man show, but now I cooperate with other 3 programmers, who are experts in their area.

Emil – the author and maintainer of Image Spider
Petr – a guy responsible for Mac and Linux versions
Vlado – an author of GPGPU version of DenoiseMyImage

We are mostly located in Prague, Czech Republic, European Union. Emil is from Sweden.

There are some competitive applications, why is SignMyImage better?
SignMyImage allows to sign the photo/image by an invisible watermark and detect the invisible watermark automatically as well. This product was developed primarily for advanced photoamateurs/professionals that earn the money selling their photos. This application is appreciated by people/companies that don’t want to let thiefs download photos from their websites. Moreover we employ web crawler (Image Spider) that crawles the web and searches for signed images. We can say that SignMyImage is cheap equivalent of well known DigiMarc. Here are others rival in this field – Eikonamark, Icemark, Photopatrol.

German prestigious c’t magazine made a comparison between these five programs (incl. SignMyImage). SMI was considered as the second best software. We have to point out that the price of SMI license is a fraction of the others price. For example the price of DigiMarc (the best one) is $500 a year if you want to protect up to 5000 photos. The price of SMI for an unlimited license is 14.99 Euros without paying any annual fee.

What i s the development in the digital watermarking in last few years ?
In this area the number of papers grows rapidly. Here exist at least two conferences with this topics. But honestly, the combination of image scaling/cropping/jpeg compression is deadly. Most papers deal with one of these transformation and don’t care about the others. But all of these appears together in most cases. Lets imagine, if we consider all the transformations, we have no stable information because of crop, we cannot use information based on single pixel because of jpeg, and we don’t know the scale of image. One of the way often followed is probabilistic approach. This approach allows to store information in many instances in every part of the picture. That means if one part is damaged or cropped you can get the information from the rest of the picture.

What technologies are you using?
Our approach is different. We use moments of continuous areas. One of moment is center of gravity. This information is very robust to noise, scaling, jpeg. Unfortunatelly its not robust to crop, so we have the information insert to the image to several different areas.
We cannot forget the second part of the project, that has the same importance. It is Image Spider – our web crawler. It uses wide spectra of technology. It consists of SQL part, PHP frontend, C++ backend, Linux scripting support, SFTP interface …

What is your vision?
The main goal of the SignMyImage is to make Internet safer. We want to help people protect their knowledge, art abilities and skills. We want to help them protect their property rights. In our opinion nobody should be non-punishable, if he steals something what belongs to someone else. Including pictures, images, drawings and photos.

The goal of the ADP Tools group is wider. We are interested in bringing image processing techniques into live. Much theory from image processing is not used in application for photographers. We are going to fill this gap.

On Wednesday, July 29th 2009, the Pixmac microstock photo bank has prepared a summer discount special. Buy credits at Pixmac and you automatically get five times more!

Details and conditions

This summer discount may be applied only once from the same IP address. If a user buys credits several times during the day, the discount is only good for the first purchase. On Wednesday, July 29th, the buyer will get the usual number of credits. The additional credits will be added within 24 hours to the buyer’s Pixmac account. Pixmac reserves the right not to add the additional credits for the buyer if improper use by the buyer is determined.

Lev Dolgachov

We conducted an interview with one of the most respected Russian microstock photographers, Lev Dolgachov.

This interview could be good inspiration both for beginning and professional photographers.

Here it is. Enjoy!

What role does photography play in your life?
I’m very dedicated to photography. Photography definitely takes most of my life now- it’s the main thing I do and it’s what I do for living.

How many years having you been using stocksites for your photos?
It’s been 3 years since I’ve started to license my works via stocksites.

Blue-eyed blond in pearls

Why do you shoot stock photos instead of other types of photos?
I don’t really do “stock photos”. What I do is what I love to do in photography as an artist. Stocksites are a great distribution channel but I would make basically the same if I would do it for fun, not for living.

What would be your suggestions for Pixmac to improve our service for users?
Image reviewing team. I would hire more professional reviewers or enhance the training of the ones you have now.

What photobank do you most like to work with and why?
I’m not into any kind of exclusive contracts with some particular license distrubutors, so I believe any agency who respects and treats me good as an artist is fine. Also, they should be able to sell licenses as well.

Is it hard to find a suitable model for photographing?
Finding really good model is not that easy, but once you can allow yourself to choose from many who want to work with you for some reason, it will not be a big problem.

Girl in fishnet underwear

What do you think of when your photos appear in advertisements, magazines, or on web pages?
It mostly feels good to see my work in action. I believe all artists love it. Art should be seen.

What advice can you give to beginning photographers?
Be professional. Whatever you’re doing in photography, always ask yourself if are you professional enough and how you can possibly improve the result or workflow. Be a perfectionist. Perfectionism is a key to success.

Many thanks to Lev for this interview. It was great pleasure for us to bring his advice and insights to our Pixmac users. Look at his photos at Pixmac.

We will be making some changes soon that will affect you if want to you upload your pictures via FTP. These will come into effect on 2009-06-16. The changes to be made are:

1) You will no longer need the special FTP username. Please use the same nickname and password as you use to log onto the website.
2) There will be two directories on your FTP account. These will be ‘creative’, for creative pictures and ‘editorial’ for editorial pictures. Please make sure you upload your picture to the correct directory.
3) You will no longer be able to create your own directories.

We hope these changes will make it even easier to upload your pictures. If you would like more information, or have any problems uploading by FTP, please contact us at customersupport@pixmac.com .

Dear photographers, thank you for selling your photos using Pixmac! We would like to tell you about a new opportunity to increase your Pixmac revenues.

We have created new special pages for all Pixmac user profiles. You can find your new public Pixmac homepage at http://www.pixmac.com/author/USERNAME (replace “USERNAME” with your own Pixmac user name).

For example, our user named “Zager” has his Pixmac home page at:
http://www.pixmac.com/author/zager
The public Pixmac user profile features the list of his/her thumbnailed photos, his/her public lightboxes and his/her bestselling photos.

You can use the link to your Pixmac user profile to promote your work on your blog, on your Facebook profile or you can share the link using Twitter.

You can earn money even from the photos authored by somebody else if you add the #USERNAME handle to any link to Pixmac

For instance, you can earn commission by linking to Pixmac homepage
(http://www.pixmac.com/#USERNAME)
or by linking to a fresh list of photos featuring some subject:
(e.g. http://www.pixmac.com/pictures/nature#USERNAME)

You can find more about our affiliate program at
http://www.pixmac.com/affiliate

We are currently preparing some new tools for our partners. If you need anything, please feel free to tell us how we can help you.

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.

Pixmac’s February offer has just ended. Lots of you are in the game and we’re really happy about that. If you haven’t already sent your pictures to approval, please do it now (you need to have uploaded the pictures before 1st March).

We’re now reviewing what you uploaded to Pixmac and what was approved. If you have more than 500 approved pictures from February, we will send you the money via Moneybookers or PayPal this month. We just need to know where to send the money, your nickname at Pixmac and your choice ($100 now or $500 later). We will  send the money in few next weeks.

Those who were participating but haven’t sent us the information will be contacted later. If you managed to upload the pictures, but haven’t sent them for approval, please do that before 15th of March and we will include them in our count.

Once again, thank you all for your time! We’re happy to have so many of you on board, because Pixmac is here to make your life easier and sell more of your photos. Stay tuned, we’re about to launch new updated Pixmac website today!

And one reminder: The speed of approval is not good right now. We are trying to improve the relevancy of our approving process while approving pictures and that cost time. We’re sorry about that.

Anyone who wants to have a 50% share of Pixmac’s revenue should upload photos before the end of February (this Saturday). Our offer “Get $100 or $500 just by uploading photos” is about to end. And I am happy to report that we’ve already sent money to the first photographers who have 500 pictures approved already! It’s easy to be as happy as them! Register here.

Yesterday a user FlemishDreams at Microstock Group mentioned that Pixmac leave your images online in the gallery for too long. We didn’t expect that would be a problem, but the change can happen!

It’s great that we can hear our users and respond to them. We’ve brainstormed and now the time we’ll keep your pictures online is set to 1 year. We are currently fixing it on the Pixmac site. But if you find the old period mentioned somewhere, please let us know and we will correct it.

Vitezslav comments: “This is a first step. Remember I am always on your side! And I will try my best so you feel comfortable with us. That is my mission here at Pixmac.”

Again, we are here to give you a really good tool to sell your photos. Thanks to all of you who love the site for its ease of use. It was one of our primary targets and it seems we’re getting there.

And remember – don’t wait and get yours $500 for 500 pictures or just try to guess the number of pictures available on Pixmac on 1st March 2009 and win an iPhone!