Stuck on Stock Photography

Say you wanted to open up a stock photography business. You have
thousands of photos that your customers can search and browse, until
they find and buy the one that’s just right for them.

What medium would you choose for your catalog? Would you print books?
No. They’re expensive to print and ship, and don’t have very good
search tools. Would you open up a physical store and display them in
the window, like real estate brokers? Narh, much too expensive to have
all those physical locations. Telephone? Probably not, it’s too hard
to explain a photo in words. Then what?

Well, if you ask me, the web seems like a pretty good
match. It’s an interactive medium, so you can build an interactive
search engine. It’s a graphical medium, so your customers can see the
photos before they decide. Won’t people just steal them without
paying? Not if you only serve them low-resolution versions until they
pay. And you can add annoying watermarks, too, which will further
discourage use without paying.

There are no shipping costs, you can just sell digital versions of the
photos, and if people want prints, you can partner with <a
href=”http://www.ofoto.com”>ofoto.com or a similar print shop. If
you’re a distributed group of people trying to decide on the right
photo for the job, you can just email each other the URL to the site,
and the person with the credit card can simply order it from there.

Why, then, do all the stock photography sites make such poor use of
the web medium? Honestly, I have no idea. But I’ll explain what I
mean.

The Scenario

To set the stage, imagine our persona, let’s call him Jonas,
trying to find a couple photos for a student counseling
publication at his university. So he needs a couple photos to
illustrate what student life is like.

One of them has to be a young adult woman, preferably dark-haired and
with glasses. The other has to be a young male with shorts and a
short-sleeved shirt, next to a bicycle. The third should be a
lecturer in a lecture hall.

He needs to discuss the photos with his fellow counselors and
his managers, before he can make the purchase. These other people have
some suggestions for different photos, and finally, they arrive at
their decision and purchase them.

Searching

Finding stock photography is about <a
href=”http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/SATISFICING.html”>satisficing. Jonas
has a picture in his mind about what the ideal photo would look
like. But he has to match that with the reality of what the stock
photography company has to offer.

How does this work? Clearly, there are some criteria that are
non-negotiable must-haves. It doesn’t really work if the woman
who’s supposed to be a student is too young or too old. It doesn’t
work if the lecturer doesn’t look like a lecturer and isn’t in a
lecturing hall.

And there are some criteria that are of lesser importance, the
nice-to-haves. The hair color, whether she wears glasses or
not, the posture of the lecturer, etc. Jonas has some preferences, but
it’s not a show-stopper if they’re not met.

Jonas’ job, then, is to eliminate all the photos that don’t meet his
must-haves, so he doesn’t have to waste any time looking at those, and
then pick the best compromise from the available photos remaining, in
a limited amount of time.

Keywords

All the stock photography sites, or at least the ones that haven’t
completely lost it, have a rich collection keywords for all their
photos. Consider <a
href=”http://www.thinkstock.com/perl/search?A=D&PID=C0013338”>this
photo for example. The keywords for this photo are: times square,
hand, urban, communication, cell phone, wireless, new york city,
holding, outdoors, woman, wap phone, color, vertical, female, chinese,
young adult. That’s the right approach, and proves that they got their
data right at the back end.

But searching is still a mess. Yes, you can click on these keywords to
see other photos with the same keywords, but when you do so, it
forgets the keywords that you already had selected. In other
words, you can only use one keyword at a time when you use this
mechanism.

There’s a bootstrapping problem, too: I can’t know in advance what keywords
they’ve chosen to use. Do they call it “young adult woman”, or “woman”,
“adult”, “20’s”? Do they call it “portrait” or “composition portrait”
or “one person”? gettyone has a neat
clearification feature. If you search for “woman”, it asks you whether
you mean “Women: Females” or “One Woman Only: Only Women”. This is
helpful (to the extent that you can discern the difference between the
alternatives).

An Alternative Design

Criticizing is easy, designing is hard. So here’s my alternative.
Given the bootstrapping problem above, the best way to start is
probably using a simple search box, where you can type in something
that’s almost guaranteed to give results, but at least throws you
in the right direction, for example “woman office”. This will get
translated into a set of keywords (gettyone helps us clarify this as
“One Woman Only:Only Women” and “Office:Place of Work”) on you
must-have list, which will then give you your first set of photos to
browse.

From there, you can either click on a photo that’s reasonable and pick
from the list of keywords for that photo to add to either your
must-have list or your nice-to-have list. The nice-to-haves would be
used to rank all the photos that mach your must-have list, so
the ones that mach most of your nice-to-haves are shown first.

Throw in nubmers for how many photos match each keyword on your lists,
and make it easy to switch a keyword from must-have to nice-to-have
and vice versa, and make it easy to temporarily disable a keyword from
your search, and you’ve also taken care of the problems of zero photos
or too many photos matching your keywords.

And of course, Jonas shouldn’t have to register before he can start
searching. After all, how does he know whether it’s worth investing
any time at all on the site, until he’s done at least a few searches
and seen a handful of credible photos.

Viewing Photos

It’s amazing how people can screw up something as simple as viewing a
photo. The photo should be viewable on a simple page, accompanied by
info on price, resolutions, keywords, etc. No frames. No
javascript. Short URLs. Why? You want your customers to be able to
email or instant message URLs for photos to each other, making
it easier for them to reach concensus on what photos to buy.

<a
href=”http://www.viewimages.com/View.asp?imageid=133274&partnerid=0”>ViewImages.com
has that right. Until you actually decide to buy the photo: The
“license image professionally” link takes you to a cul-de-sac.

Project Folders

Notice how Jonas needs three photos, each matching its own specific set of
requirements. For each photo he needs, there’s a job satisficing to be done.

It would seem natural to offer Jonas to set up a project folder with
the list of photos that he needs. For each of these photos, he could
type in the description of what he’s looking for, save his lists of
must-have and nice-to-have keywords, save the photos he’s found that
might do, share the project folder with his colleagues, allowing them
to comment on the photos and add their own.

I haven’t seen any stock photography site that supported this kind of
“project folder” thinking. A business opportunity, perhaps?

Practical Advice on Finding Stock Photography

The first thing you sould be aware of are the differences in
licensing. There are royalty-free photos, which have a fixed
license fee, and are generally cheap (around $30), but don’t give you
any guarantees about who else uses the photo. Then there are the
rights-protected ones, where you can make sure that your
competitor don’t go using that same photo for their ad campaign at the
same time, and where you buy the license for a specific purpose and a
specific time period. These are generally much more expensive (about
$250 and up).

The photos I needed were for the <a
href=”http://developer.arsdigita.com/acs-java/user-centered/personas.html”>personas
for a software project, so the royalty-free license was clearly the
right license for the job. Unfortunately, some of the photos I first
found were rights-protected, so I had to spend a couple more hours
finding replacements for those, later in the project.

After having suffered through numerous stock photography sites, I
finally settled on gettyone.com,
which has a huge selection of photos, and a decent search
interface. You can’t share the URLs with your colleagues, but I
managed to get by with some URL surgery and some View Source. I’ll use
them again next time, unless some of the others shape up. And I hope
that gettyone will shape up as well.

Lessons Learned

We’ve seen how something that’s a perfect candidate for the web medium
can still be messed up by mediocre design. And we’ve seen how the
simple techniques of personas and scenarios can help us do a better
job. Use them on your next project.

If you’re interested in doing this yourself, take a look at the
<a
href=”http://developer.arsdigita.com/acs-java/user-centered/”>training
materials I’ve put together for the <a
href=”http://www.arsdigita.com/products/”>ACS software for <a
href=”http://www.arsdigita.com”>ArsDigita.