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 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 .

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.

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.

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!

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!

There are two new functions just launched. Affiliate program – a tool for friends of Pixmac and Advanced search – a tool for better searching.

If you’re the one who runs a website read more about Affiliate program on our website. Basically it’s a tool for you to share the power Pixmac has. If you put a link to your website or to a discussion forum, with the appropriate code it will bring you happiness. But lets stop just talking – what about some earnings? Yes, there are some.

And the Advanced search? Its a great tool which helps people with precise searching. Lets have alook on the Pixmac homepage. There it is. Just small text right under the search field. But when you open it, the strong search tool pops-up. If you are confident about what you’re looking for – this is a piece of ones and zeros that trully helps.

And one last thing. If the affiliate banners at Pixmac site are not enough for you. Here are some more

Selling stock photos is a hard work. If you love taking pictures it’s fun. But when the time comes to uploading and managing the images for selling, suddenly the hard part comes. At Pixmac that is history. Keywording is automatically for free.

When I was surfing the web to find out what people think about Pixmac, I found a discussion at Microstock Group website. The geeks with soon becoming professionals were discussing the keywording issue and were searching for solutions.

Actually, there are solutions

• Use software to use the keywords for more sites at once
• Pay the site for keywording
• Upload your pictures to Pixmac

The real reason behind this free keywording is the accuracy of the search. That is a benefit for both sides. As you are propably the professional in photography, we have a lot of experience in searching and setting keywords. So why distract your focus to anything else? Do your job better than before and leave the rest to Pixmac.

We at Pixmac want to be fair and open. Our primary target is to make a great tool for the photographers and the buyers. So feel free to contact us and ask. We need to know your needs to make Pixmac even better.

More in the discussion:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php?topic=6286.0

Interesting point of view:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=5418674

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.