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.
