Sell photos on photrade | By HamWithCam
Ever since I discovered Photrade.com through their sponsorship of Blog Indiana, I’ve been admiring the service and slowly starting to use it. My main interest in the service is the ability for bloggers to find great photography and easily place it on their blog or website. Many bloggers just grab images from Google Image Search or where ever they can find them without consideration for the legal implications of using photos without permission. With Photrade, the permission is built-in.
On the other side, photographers (professional and amateur) can profit off not only your free usage of their photos, but the integrated marketplace allowing their photos to be licensed/sold at prices they can control. All photos can be watermarked with a custom mark that helps protect everyone’s photos. If someone wants to purchase the right to use your photo without the watermark, Photrade facilitates that purchase in an automated way.
I believe this new service, which is just now in beta, has huge potential. Below, I humbly submit some feedback from what I’ve experienced so far.
- I love the ability to search for blog post images and easily post into my blog. I would love stronger integration the way flickr lets you make blog posts about a photo directly to your self-hosted blog.
- Please, please, please release an API. I think a killer application for Photrade would be a Wordpress plugin that would let me browse Photrade’s database of photos straight from my “Create New Post” screen. Then, just a button click drops the photo into my blog post.
- It would be great if the framing and links that accompany an embedded Photrade photo could be customized. I’d just like to see the style, spacing, and fonts be a little better styled (or give me control).
- The uploader works pretty well and it is fairly fast (as they claim). However, it would be great if they could add some kind of counter letting me know how many photos I’ve uploaded and if any had any errors. Also, once the uploads are done, there is nothing prompting me as to what to do next.
- A more detailed, expanded view of all my photo view activity and their earnings.
- And last but not least… I can’t wait until the Flickr integration is complete! That is what is really keeping me from using Photrade to full potential. I have a pro account at Flickr and use it for ALL my photos. Being able to import photos directly from Flickr would make Photrade my 2nd favorite photo app (maybe my first, depending on the size of my next royalty check!)
Of course, the site is still beta, and is still amazing. I highly suggest you check it out: Photrade.com
5 Responses
Noah,
I work for Photrade. Just wanted to say thanks for using the site and this review! Many of your suggestions are in the pipeline. They’re all great!
Let us know if you need anything.
-Chris Bergman
Noah,
GREAT post! This is one of the best entries about the site and I’ve read about 57 of them since Nov.
I really like your ideas, especially the API with Wordpress.
Another good thing I think would be a RSS feed for photographers, that way I can rotate a slideshow of images from photrade instead of smugmug/flickr/et al.
Photrade in the News Roundup at Photrade Blog
[...] Noah Coffey gives us his impressions. [...]
Photrade is cool, and their BlogIndiana representatives Andrew and Krista are awesome people, but our fundamental assumptions about copyright, fair use and intellectual property still suffer from several mind-bending problems. Check out my response to this issue on Turning Left Against Traffic at:
http://www.robbyslaughter.com/blog/?2008-08-17
I just wish it worked! This is a REALLY BETA beta. How about the search capabilities (or lack of). Try to find a photo on the site that you know exists. Sadly I thought this was a great concept. The worst is when your customers view an image on this site and comment “it looks so much better on Flickr”. I don’t know why this is the case, but I don’t have time to figure out what they should have figured out for themselves. Don’t invest in this!
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