Freeing Photos from Agencies
Anyone involved in stock photography in recent months will be aware of the bombshell dropped by A Leading Stock Agency upon its contributors. Not to dwell on the one symptom of a larger problem, but this largest source of stock-photography income for many small artists just unilaterally “restructured” its compensation for contributors, leaving all but the most successful holding a mere $0.10 per sale for most of their business, and keeping up to 85% of the take.
One hopes that this business decision will become its own punishment, but in the meantime photographers are mounting a boycott and taking their work elsewhere, while mostly remaining at the mercy of agencies who can buy each other up or join the race to the abyss at any moment. The World Wide Web was not meant to be like this, with a few huge players vacuuming up the world’s business and the small contributor squeezed out and forced to work for free.
The web, and increasingly the new peer-to-peer web, were meant to provide something more tailored to the independent player. It’s time for some push-back, but the small player still incurs the same penalties as ever — the struggle for visibility, economies of scale, and when she finally makes it, the temptation to be bought out. But some of us are both photographers and developers, and surely we can do better. Well, my attempt starts here.
Everything from this point on will seem like self-promotion or even advertising, but I ask you to bear with me. The site I am about to describe is open-source, and you can already pick up your own copy of my code and run with it alone, putting it on your Raspberry Pi or on your commercially-hosted web server or whatever. Be my guest. What I want to do is a bit bigger.
I want to get a professional-level, distributed photo server into the hands of every stock photographer out there. This will allow them to market their own shots how they want and in a format they control. More than that, however, I want it to pool the photos of an entire community. We would put our photos up and sell them for ourselves, but that won’t make us big enough to be seen. All together, though, the community of photographers would be bigger than any agency. So we will need reciprocal linking between pool members, maybe even to other pools, making up one huge network on which, with enough links, any buyer can reach any photo.
“What’s in it for me?” I hear you ask? Well, it’s an economy of scale. And it’s visibility bigger than your Flickr feed or personal homepage. In fact, it might link those up, too. There are questions that will need answering. How is compensation generated by linking to others to be shared? Well, I don’t know. Maybe I won’t even have to decide, because I’d bet someone out there can come up with a scheme to let each of you set your own terms. Maybe even write a “smart contract”. But that’s a bit of technological wizardry for a later post, or another developer. How can we secure our work from copyright infringements? Don’t know yet. Maybe another smart contract. Or maybe the photo itself could be made the hash for a block-chain ledger. Early days yet.
It will need people to get involved. I will try to post articles now and again from here on describing the technical functioning of this photo server. For the initiated, it is a Python Django web application hosted (at present) on PythonAnywhere. It picks up my pictures off a SmugMug account, stores their addresses and the albums and other metadata in a little database and serves them up on a page which is also meant to tout my skills to employers. I’ll get around to putting it into Docker and then on Kubernetes so that it scales, and at the same time hopefully gets me attention from software companies looking for an old bloke who can build web sites. It needs to be easy to copy and configure for your own use, Constant Reader, so that it acquires its own life.
It could replace agencies. It could leave the photographers holding all the royalties.
