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!

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.

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.