Vetta Collection Unveiled

iStockphoto.com has had a “Premiere” collection in the works for a while.  This morning they announced the Vetta collection of iStockphoto exclusive artists’ content.

It’s not enough to want success. You have to take risks, develop ruthless standards and never, ever settle. Images in the Vetta Collection, Italian for peak, seized their own artistic destiny and created a whole new calibre of art.

Vetta images are hand-picked by a team of high-performance iStockphoto editors for:

Exquisite art direction
Intelligently executed concepts
Rarity

As an FYI to buyers, there is a higher price point, from $20 for a small to $70 for an XXL.  The benefit appears to be saved time, as the collection is tightly edited.

Note, that in the “Advanced Search” options pull down, there is the option for “include Vetta, exclude Vetta, Vetta only”, which allow you to keep this in or out as you wish.  When Vetta images appear in your results, you’ll know, because they have a small gold camera next to them, as opposed to the plain grey one for the regular collection.

You can see the Vetta collection here: http://www.istockphoto.com/vetta.php If you are interested, I have had some images moved to the Vetta collection, which you can see here.

Public and Private Lightboxes

Todays iStockphoto.com topic should be handy to both buyers and contributors.  The “lightbox“.

Definition

First of all, what is a “lightbox”?  In traditional film terms, and where the “digital” term comes from, a lightbox is a box with a light underneath a translucent top.  A photographer would lay negatives or slides on the top to be able to study them while illuminated.  Kind of like an x-ray viewbox you see at the doctor’s office.  They would use a magnifying “loupe” to get down and peer at the tiny images to make their design decisions.  This is why the larger image that pops up when you mouseover a search result at iStockphoto is called a “loupe”.

In todays “digital” world, a lightbox is simply a collection of images, that someone has put together, which is stored in the web site’s database.  A lightbox is normally used in conjunction with a photography (stock or otherwise) web site.  You don’t make a lightbox on your computer at home.

iStockphoto – Creating

Under every piece of regular content on iStockphoto is an icon of a lightbulb with a tiny “+” sign.  When you click on this, it will pop up the lightbox addition dialog.

So, now you can add it to an existing lightbox (collection) from ones you have already created, or you may create a new one.  You may give a new lightbox any name you like, but it should be descriptive, like “Summer Camp Brochure Project” or “Smiling People on White”.  This will come into play later.  Keep in mind just calling it “My Lightbox” isn’t a great choice.

Ok, so now you’ve created a new lightbox.   Go crazy and add all the images you need to the lightbox.  It’s a great way to keep together images you are interested in for a project.  After you have created a lightbox or added to one, it will stay as the default in the drop down, so all you have to do is click and then “add”.

Lightbox Manager

A list of your lightboxes will appear on your Lightbox Manager page.

Most of this is self explanatory, but check out that column titled “Public”.  What is that about?

There are two “types” of lightboxes, “Public” and “Private”.     As you can see at the top of the manager page:

A public lightbox should serve the community and is available in the iStockphoto lightbox search after it contains at least 20 files. A private lightbox is used for personal and project related collections, and is accessible to anyone to whom a link has been sent.

Lightboxes that are notated as Public will be searchable from the Lightbox Main Page.  The description above states it pretty clearly that a Public Lightbox should serve the community.  Collecting all of your own images of the Golden Gate Bridge in a lightbox called “My Golden Gate Bridge Images” and making it public does NOT serve the community.  Serving the community would be a lightbox called “iStock’s Best Golden Gate Bridges”, filled with content from a bunch of different contributors.  That’s not to say, that if you specialize in bridge shots, you can’t have a good number of images in there, but it doesn’t help buyers find what they need by pimping your personal collection in the public lightbox search.

iStock lightly attempts to enforce this with the rule that there must be at least one piece of content from another artist in the box besides the owner before it can be made public.  You will see contributors with 100 images of their own, and 1 from someone random, just so they can make the box publicly searchable.  This is obviously not the intent of the rule, and it always bothers me that contributors ignore that.

Now, if you think you have a lightbox that serves the community of buyers, to make a lightbox public, click on the “edit description” link.  There, once you have a variety of contributors’ content in your lightbox and at least 20 images, you will see the option to make it public.  Once clicked, it will take about 24 hours to become public.

Again, as mentioned above, a Private Lightbox can be seen by anyone who has the link.  You can email it to someone, put it in an image description, on your webpage, whereever.  You don’t need a password or anything to see the contents.  So, if you are a designer collecting images for a project, keep the box private, and email the link to your co-worker.

Also, if you are the owner of the lightbox, you can click on the link under the “Admin” column on the manager page to add other people who are allowed to add to your lightbox.  That’s useful if you have several people with accounts on a project and you want them all to be able to add images to show to your boss.

Lightbox Page

When you search the public lightbox collection from the main lightbox page, you will get two sets of results to browse through.  There is a return where your search matched the description, and one where it matched the keywords.  This keyword search is just a text match.  There is no fancy controlled vocabulary here.  Some people tend to be more “descriptive” then “keywordy”, so it makes sense to browse both returns.  There aren’t really any good ways of sorting the return (creation date, files in collection, etc.), and there’s a bug where the creation date still doesn’t display (still, after 3 years or so), but there are some great lightboxed collections of things that may be hard to find by regular searches.  People holding blank business cards, isolated people, blue skies, etc.

Lightbox Tool

You may want to print out the contents of your lightbox to show to someone at a meeting, or take to your editor.  There is no easy way to do this from iStock, so I have created a utility at my website to make a simple page to print out.  It’s pretty self explanatory.

http://digitalplanetdesign.com/index.php?page=lightbox

Are Lighboxes Good For You

Occasionally, a new contributor will ask something along the lines of “My image was added to a lightbox – is that a good thing?”.  They’ll know this, because in the contributor content page, it will list the number of public and private lightboxes an image is in.

The lower image is in two public lightboxes (the linked, bolder ones) and 2 unnamed private boxes.

To answer the question, why wouldn’t it be good that someone has shown interest in your image, either in a public, searchable box, or a private collection?

In fact, you may actively try to get your images into other people’s public lightboxes to gain exposure.  If you find a public lightbox that your content would be a suitable part of, just sitemail the owner a nice request to look at your work.  Do not say “Dig through my portfolio – you’ll find it”.  Include links to specific images or to a targeted search of just those images, to make it easy for the lightbox owner to consider.  If people mail me a request for one of my few public lightboxes, I will not spend too much energy on them if there are no links.

An owner is not obligated to add your content.  If they ignore you or turn you down, just move on.  No big deal.

Linking Your Images

If you’ve noticed other contributors have neat little images on their profiles or image pages, and you’re trying to figure out how to do that, see #17 here.  Personally, I prefer a linked portfolio search to the lightbox search, but you may not.

Conclusion

Lightboxes are a great tool to organize your collections of images.  They can also be useful to find collections of related imagery in the public lightbox search.

Some iStock Humor

Occasionally, in the forums on iStock, a contributor will post something along the lines of “What should I shoot?”, or “What is the collection missing?”.  Normally, my response is something along the lines of “Keep your best ideas to yourself”.  However, in a recent thread, contributor redmonkey8 came up with this great list (   <- note the wink) of subject niches that need to be filled…

1. More shots of business people doing business things like shaking hands, pointing to graphs and charts, drawing diagrams on glass, standing in lines or groups with one person in focus and the rest out of focus, etc, etc.
2. Flowers. Man, there just aren’t enough flowers on this site. Get out in your gardens and start shooting!
3. Customer service people. You know what we really need? Photos of smiling customer service reps wearing telephone headsets. We don’t have enough of those.
4. Goldfish. How come nobody’s shooting goldfish? Get on it people! Make them jump around, from bowl to bowl, or just sit there in the water. We need more goldfish.
5. Pets. Pets are incredibly unrepresented here on iStock. Let’s get some pet pictures already. I’d start with cats and dogs, and then work my way through the list.
6. Feet. Why aren’t more of you taking pictures of your own feet? Those are sure to be best sellers.
7. Brick walls. If there is one thing we really need around here it’s pictures of brick walls. If I wanted to sell a lot of stuff here on iStock, I’d start by photographing a lot of brick walls.
8. Going on vacation? For god’s sake, photograph everything! There is a serious lack of vacation-style snapshots around here, and we’d all be better off if there were more.
9. More architectural elements. Surely there are some interesting buildings in your home town with intersting corners, windows, cornices, doorways and the like. Get out there and start snapping! We especially need spiral staircases, escalators, elevators, etc etc.
10. Less than attractive people that are labled as “beautiful”. This may be the most glaring omission of all in the iStock collection. Get your camera, take a photo of a less than attractive person doing something, then when you upload it make sure to describe the person as “beautiful”, “sexy”, “gorgeous” etc. Keyword it that way too. Fun for all.
11. Macro shots of microchips and computer components on blue backgrounds, or lit with high-tech looking blue light.
12. Hands in many different positions. Isolated on white would be nice.
13. Sunsets, skies, and clouds. Definitely a shortage of these.
14. Little kids, running though grassy or flower-filled meadows. Ditto for women in the same setting with arms spread wide and satisfied and contented looks on their faces as if they’ve just been set free. If they’re pulling the petals off of flowers, or blowing on dandelions, then that’s a plus.
15. Lone trees on wide open landscapes. Ditto for wooden piers or walkways extending out into placid looking lakes or bodies of water.
16. People making frames with their hands.
17. Teens, in groups, hanging out and laughing as if being a teen is the best thing ever. Make sure they’re as multi-ethnic as possible, and at least one of them is in the background texting.
18. Fire. We need everything from regular campfire/fireplace type of stuff, all the way up to backgrounds filled with flame.

In the interest of disclosure, I do have something in my portfolio that would fit into about half of these.

Portfolio Update

Ok, I know I said I was going to post another portfolio update last week, but I’ve been very busy processing files, taking time out to rant a bit about Good Morning America.  Anyways, let me point out some new collections of royalty free stock imagery I’ve been adding to my portfolio at iStockphoto.com .

I did a session with a school bus and some elementary school students two years ago, but I had trouble with scheduling and got them online a little too close to back to school time.   Planning worked out a little better this year, so I’m happy to present (with enough lead time) this new series with a great, photogenic group of teenagers for “Back to School” session.  Now, you’ve got all summer to work these into your designs!

Up next, the news is always discussing childhood obesity and the need to get out and excercise.  Also, youth sports are always big spring and fall activities.  Available now is this “Girls Soccer Team with Coach” series, for anyone working on article about youth soccer, or even advertisements.  It’s also about self esteem and success.

I’ve got two more series to fill you in on, but I will wait a day (or more )  just to spread it out a bit.  Thanks!