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!

Pixmac will be unavailable on Thursday, 30th July 2009 from 7pm to 7.30pm GMT (1am to 1.30am EST). We are upgrading our hardware and unfortunately that will interrupt the service.

We apologize for the inconvience and we will be back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for visiting Pixmac and we hope to see you back again soon.

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 .

Pixmac will be unavailable on Thursday, 28th May 2009 from 1pm to 1.30pm GMT (7am to 7.30am EST). We are upgrading our hardware and unfortunately that will interrupt the service.

We apologize for the inconvience and we will be back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for visiting Pixmac and we hope to see you back again soon.

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.

We were talking with Erik from Imagery Majestic this weekend about questions popping up in communities and forums about the approval process. And we want to be fair and clear about this. For clarification of the issue, read more below.

Why were the all pictures rejected at once on Friday 3th April?

Vitezslav Valka, CEO: “Our approval system was under heavy development over the last few weeks. We’ve finally made a number of crucial improvements there. As you may know, the process was slow but we have found a solution to fix it. I would like to walk you through the process as it was on Pixmac until the end of last week. I’ll also go over the new one, which will be more effective and clear to our contributors.”

Old approval process

• picture is uploaded and sent to approval
• reviewer inspects the photo and sends it to editors (team coordinated by Denisa Haveldova)
• editor verifies the decision and finally sends it to web or to rejected pictures
• user gets an email per photo (lots of emails sometime)

New approval process

• picture is uploaded and sent to approval
• reviewer inspects the photo and sends it directly to web or to rejected pictures
• user gets an email once a day
• user can dispute (complain about the rejection) up to 30 decisions per week until a month from rejection
• disputes go to editor in chief (Denisa) and she makes final decision

The approval process is unclear to us. Solution?

Vitezslav Valka, CEO: “This should be much clearer now. When we were slow with our reviews, we decided to review (review again by Editor) the approved pictures first. The reason for this is simple: Get the pictures online and selling as soon as possible. That is why some of you were getting a few accepted and a few rejected pictures in last few weeks. Friday’s big rejection was a result of the dispute option being implemented. So from that moment, we don’t have to wait for the Editor’s final decision. The process is now pretty fast and I hope it is clear to everybody.”

Why is the rejection rate sometimes about 50% ?

Denisa Haveldova, Content: “The approval rate may sometimes be different from other agencies. Remember that we don’t have any upload limits, we’re happy that contributors upload a lot to Pixmac. Unfortunately we’ve experienced that a huge number of very similar pictures from one shoot will be uploaded, without any review from the photographer. We’ve also found that some contributors don’t check images in Actual size (Zoom to 100%) before uploading. So pictures that seem to be great at first, unfortunately don’t meet our criteria for the technical quaility, sharpness etc.

As to the reasons of refusal: Please keep in mind, that the text of the reasons for refusal is automatic. It aims to fit to the particular picture as much as possible, but of course each picture is individual, and from time to time it can happen that it will not explain the problem of the picture exactly.”

If somebody has 498 pictures approved and needs 500: We’ve seen some contributors who are only a few pictures short of the “500 accepted” goal from February. This is mainly caused by uploading a little more than 500 pictures to Pixmac without keeping in mind that some of them could be rejected. But everybody makes mistakes, so we have decided to pay the $500 or $100 even for 480 pictures.

Contact us if you have an individual problem!

If you have any questions about this issue, contact us via comments below, or send us an email. We’re here for you! Denisa Haveldova is the head of approving/editing team and she knows everything about our content. You can contact her directly: denisa.haveldova@pixmac.com. If you have a question regarding a particular image, the best thing is to mention the ID or put a link to it in the email body. Other technical issues are under the control of Vitezslav Valka, the CEO of Pixmac. Anything else can be solved by Contacting us directly.

We’ve just finished and polished many functions on Pixmac. In the last few weeks we have made Pixmac even easier, faster and more comprehensive for you – the user.

There are plenty of new things at Pixmac and even more bug fixes. We’ve also had some great records in sales. So lets go ahead with the functions and other news.

Collections

We are now separating our collections. From now on you can choose to search within the Pixmac or Fotolia collection or both. We know this will make the life easier for you. We’re also working on some additions, and we’ll let you know the details in a few weeks.

Better Advanced Search

We’ve made improvements to advanced search. Now you can look for new pictures or pictures from a particular author more easily. For easier browsing of the results you can now turn the Dynamic preview on or off, which is great if you don’t want to be distracted while searching for the best shot.

Easier tools for Photographers

You may know that we expanded our collection with a lot of new pictures in the last month. That proved our team and also our technology. We’re happy to tell you that the website is about 3 times faster. But for photographers, the tools to manage your collection are easier and more comprehensive. We believe this will encourage those who care about their time to stay at Pixmac.

2.3 Million pictures at Pixmac

We haven’t been around as long as our competitors, but even so you can already choose from 2.3 million pictures at Pixmac. That’s because we have two collections. We’re still the first and only agency in microstock to provide two microstock collections on one site for one registration.

1000 new users per month

More than a thousand new users joined Pixmac last month. That means more than 36 per day! Isn’t that great?

Our Dream Team would like to thank you for this great success!

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.

Pixmac will be unavailable on Saturday, 24th January 2009 from 5am to 6am GMT (Midnight to 1am EST). We are upgrading our hardware and unfortunately that will interrupt service. We apologize for the inconvience and we will be back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for visiting Pixmac and we hope to see you back again soon.