PurePhoto - A promising alternative to Flickr ?

June 13, 2011 @ 9:41AM

PurePhoto - A promising alternative to Flickr ?

Topics
News > New Products & Announcements

Figured I'd take a brief moment to tell you about a new site called PurePhoto, which, as the title of this post suggests, could be an exciting new alternative to the vastly popular photo-sharing site most everyone is familiar with by now, Flickr.

I've been using Flickr for just over six years now. I owe a great many things to the site. It definitely helped to boost my carreer early on, simply because it's a great platform to showcase your work to a potentially huge audience in a relatively short period of time.
I suspect I'll be using it for some time yet.

So why would I need an alternative?

Flickr was a lot smaller and friendlier back in 2005. At that time its offices were still based in Canada and Yahoo had yet to take over, and the heavy-handed censoring of all things potentially "offensive" hadn't really started yet. ***

With Flickr users now numbering tens of millions (from what I last heard), the friendly community aspect of the site has deteriorated somewhat, and while there are a great many people using it to showcase artistic photography, it's also just a great place to store everyday snapshots, which is it's primary use to a lot of people. In short, Flickr in its current state is a huge and not very focused pool of photos from everywhere and every walk of life. Definitely great for what it is, but perhaps not the optimum platform to showcase artwork, per se.

Another of Flickr's shortcomings , in my opinion, is the fact that it's not a direct selling platform. With this in mind, I find the premise of PurePhoto rather exciting. Still in it's formative stages, the site comes across as a slightly more elegant counterpart to Flickr, putting more emphasis on artistic photography rather than a place for everyone to show off their random personal snapshots. And it's a place to buy and sell as well. While it's too soon to say if this will take off in the same way as Flickr, I think it definitely has the potential to offer something new and exciting to those who want to expand on what they've been doing on Flickr.
You can check out my profile here.

( ***Don't get me wrong- I don't feel people should be allowed to post gross stuff on Flickr, but even the barest hint of nudity puts you in danger of having your entire photostream moderated or shut down, which is just annoying. Obviously there's tasteful and not-so-tasteful nudity to be found on the internet. Putting all of it into one category is ridiculous. Nudity is, has been and always will be a part of photography, and art in general, so deciding none of it can be freely shared on Flickr puts a bit of a lame stamp on the site. I'll save any lengthier discussion of nudity on the internet for a later post, that's not what I was going to write about now. )

Comments

Damien Franco

Pixiq Expert

11 months ago

Yeah I just checked it out.

Pretty cool stuff. I like what they're doing.

Thanks for the heads up on this one.

Gurpreet

11 months ago

Hi Rebekka, interesting site - I just checked it out. How would you say it compared with similar sites that are more orientated towards selling than Flickr - such as RedBubble or 500px?

Randi Scott

11 months ago

I checked it out and joined.

It does look good.

Randi

Steve Heap

11 months ago

Rebekka

I saw the site mentioned in a magazine in mid May and joined then. I also find it to be a well constructed and run site, but it is probably very early (as you said) to be sure that it will come to anything. The founders seem to be very helpful and commented nicely on one of my images, but I have had very little interest since that time.

I put a relatively small collection up there to test the waters - Steve H Collection on PurePhoto, but I am not sure that I will continue to upload just yet. I tried to find out if anyone actually has any sales, but so far, I haven't succeeded in that task!

I did my short review of Pure Photo on my blog a couple of weeks ago. As I noted there, there needs to be some sign of action on the site to make it worth putting a lot of effort into uploading images to yet another site.

I do keep a site on Smugmug which has actually turned out to be more successful than I expected - with a $90 sale of various photos of Warsaw arriving out of the blue in May. Keen Photographers should consider that as an alternative as it is pretty easy to create a professional looking site over there.

Steve

John

11 months ago

Steve,

It's John here from PurePhoto. We appreciate the nice write-up from Rebekka and all the interest/comments. Thanks for your write-up, too, Steve. I want to address the sales question that you posed in your post.

We're not attempting to be "just a sales site" or even a portfolio site like SmugMug. Our primary focus is on the community - creating a place for people to connect with others and share their best work. Unlike Flickr, we're inviting different types of people (i.e. buyers) into that community. Our focus has been on photographers so far because you can't attract buyers without great art. Regardless, sales are a result of having a strong community as a base. If we wanted just a simple ecommerce site we wouldn't have gone through the effort to build all the social features.

We use the community and professional curators to discover the best of the best, and ultimately the better the work, the more exposure you will receive and the greater your chance of a sale. People who are active on the site will usually (although not always) increase their image rankings over time. Just like on Flickr or other sites, engagement always helps to get you noticed. I just processed the May payouts yesterday and I assure you things are selling.

It may help to note the types of things that are selling on the site. The buyers coming here (so far at least) tend to be looking for "artistic" prints - things that communicate ideas, stimulate our minds, and even tell a story. Yes they need to be technically strong, of course, but these are often conversation pieces for someone's home or office. We also generally look for these types of images for our online and offline promotional activities because we know they will sell.

I hope this helps. Thanks again for the write-up and thanks for joining PurePhoto.

John

Steve Heap

11 months ago

John

Thanks for the extensive reply - it certainly was enough to make me decide to have another look at the site and decide which images may meet those criteria. I'll add more to my own review of PurePhoto">My Stock photo blog as I learn more.

Do you think this image is the sort of thing that you have in mind with more "Artistic" prints?

One plea though - do you think you could enable the reading of metadata from images? I'm not planning to upload 100s of images, but as my photos already have titles, descriptions and tags in the metadata, it is very frustrating to have to enter them again by hand!

Steve

John

11 months ago

Yes Steve. You can also check out the Editor's Picks and curated sections of our store if that helps.

We actually ingest the metadata now, although it isn't displaying properly in our site. If you leave the fields blank when uploading it will retain the file title. In our tests we see the tags being included in the file but we need to write some scripts to pull them from the appropriate fields in the files. (Not all imaging software puts it in the same place.) Our initial focus is on Adobe and Mac products. Once we normalize the data we can also display it properly.

Sorry for the bugs. We're working on it. :-)

John

Giuseppe M.

11 months ago

Hi Rebekka

Thank you for the suggestion! I checked the site and created a profile (well I also added you as a fav!), but it's still a bit obscure to me how to upload images. The only way I've found up to now is through the groups. As far as you know, are there other wayt to upload images?
Thanks a lot and regards

Giuseppe

Steve Heap

11 months ago

Hi Giuseppe

The way to do it (at least the way I found) was to create a collection first - this gives you the equivalent of a folder to put images into. When you click on Collections on the left, you should see a "Create new collections +."

Once the collection is there, go to the collection and along the top toolbar you will see "Add images to this collection." From there it is easy, although the system does not pick up any metadata from the images and so even though you may have descriptions, title and keywords in the file, you still have to enter them manually. I suggested they could read the metadata to one of the owners, but I don't think it has been implemented.

Steve

Dani Mouser

11 months ago

Hi Rebekka,

After reading your informative blog post, I thought I'd check the site out too. Love it, by the way! I posted a link to my photography site on Facebook, where one person replied with this:

Dani, just something to take a good look at from their TOS: "In the event that you post or upload to the Service, or otherwise submit to or through PurePhoto as part of your use of the Service, any Submission, you will retain ownership of such Submissions, and you hereby grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid, irrevocable right to use, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), and publicly display and perform (publicly or otherwise) such Submissions, solely in connection with the Service (including without limitation for purposes of promoting the Service)." Be careful about giving away your copyright, because that is what is basically happening.

Are you concerned about this at all? I'm not very adept at reading into legal-ese, so I'm not sure if this sounds worse than it really is, or if its something to be concerned about.

Thoughts?

dani

P.S. I love your work..

Steve Heap

11 months ago

Dani

I read through that before uploading my own images, as I sell many of them through the various stock photography sites. Here is my interpretation (non-lawyer warning here!)

All you are giving them is a license to use the image for the sole purpose of the Service (which is the PurePhoto site and associated services) and for promoting the Service. You retain the ownership and are quite free to sell other licenses to use the image as well. The only problem you might get into (and I'm not a lawyer) is if you wanted to give an exclusive license to someone else - you would not be able to do that as PurePhoto already has a license.

I'd be interested in anyone else's views but that is the way I read it.

Steve
My Stock photo blog

John

11 months ago

Yes Dani, we claim no rights to your images other than the ability to use them on our site or for marketing purposes. If you ever want to give an exclusive license to someone else, we can simply remove your image from the store. You can still retain the image on the site for sharing purposes or remove it entirely. In the end, they are your images and it's your account.

I hope this helps!

John

Giuseppe M.

11 months ago

Steve, thank you for your help

Giuseppe

Thjan

7 months ago

So ... Purephoto will be a somewhat more professional version of deviantart.com ?

I am still far away from being a great artist but I already try to determine on what sites I should open up an account. So many options.