The 16th of June officially marks Picade's first anniversary in existence as a legal entity, and it is a time to reflect on where we came from and where we are going.
There are congratulations to be given out to all of us, but one person in particular stands out: Brian Seed.
Picade started life as a series of postings on the SAA mail list/forum by Brian, and he has vigorously advocated and pursued the idea of a photographer owned, true stock photography agency ever since. In the truest sense of the phrase, without Brian Seed we would not exist today, and we all owe him an immeasurable debt of gratitude for his vision and for the job that he has done.
Kudos friend Brian, many, many kudos for a job extraordinarily well done!!!
Congratulations also, to all of our pioneering Founding Members for having the faith and conviction to take the risk and try and create something new and benefical to photographers:
Paul Avis,
Cristian Baitg,
Michael Beasley,
John G. Blair,
Burgess Blevins,
Beth Dixson,
Rob Doda,
Nick Dunmur,
Laura Dwight,
Elizabeth Etienne,
Garry Gay,
Thomas Hallstein,
Michael Hart,
Mike Hill,
Spencer Jones,
Ali Kabas,
Bill Lesch,
Peter Miller,
David Paterson,
Marc PoKempner,
Clayton Price,
Nat Rea,
Antonia Reeve,
Marco Secchi,
Brian Seed,
Terry Thompson,
Michael Vitti,
Andrew Wakeford,
David H. Wells,
and Harald Woeste
Along the way to where we are now we have weathered a number of contentious trials and tribulations that threatened to sink the business stillborn, and have lost the energy and future contributions of people who might still make a positive contribution to us if they choose to join, and we offer them an open hand of friendship and welcome if they choose to do so.
Today we have a real legal business that is a year old, with 30 founder owner/member photographers, with money in the bank, with a web presence via PhotoShelter that offers (04 June 2007) 6769 professional images currently online and searchable for rights-managed licensing with the capability to do full online ecommerce payment.
Our images are backed up in three geographically diverse locations, including in our physical office in Chicago, where we have business phone and fax numbers now appearing in the printed telephone books.
Our Board and management committees are in existence and functioning and working very hard for our mutual benefit.
Finally, we have standing in the wings a professional stock photography agency business manager with extraordinary credentials, Michael Jungert, who will soon begin to help us transition the agency to the sales and marketing phase of our history, and then to take over the day-to-day marketing and sales management responsibilities of our agency.
We have worked hard on creating and embedding significant metadata in our images, and have fought and gotten major structural changes at PhotoShelter to preserve that embedded metadata in delivered images such that we should not have to worry about the movement to create an "orphan works" exception to copyright, and are thereby leading most if not all other agencies in this area.
Our own website has been in existence for 7 months and currently is configured primarily to attract new Members, and to provide a mechanism for communication and collaboration among the Members, and is in significant use by the Board in our own collaboration and in working to obtain new Members.
The growth of our Membership and our image collection is key to our survival, and while Brian is retiring as Board Chairman, he intends to keep working on our mutual behalf by heading our effort to get quality new members and their images. Key to that effort will be our website and starting to make actual licensing sales.
I am currently working on the design and implementation of a new customer-centric focus for our website that will integrate with our images and presence on PhotoShelter to provide a seamless design and experience for professional buyers wishing to license the work that we do, while still affording us our private communication areas and the ability to attract new photographer Members.
This new website design will shift the primary function of our site from obtaining new Members, to attracting buyers and facilitating licensing our images. It will be structured to place minimum barriers between buyers arriving on our site and their ability to find and license our images.
Other primary design considerations are on continuing to be able to continue to attract new photographer Members, and continuing to support our private Extranet capability, which is intended to be significantly enhanced to add individualized online reporting of image licensing for Members, and the ability of the individual Members to maintain their own personal information.
On a technical basis, the design is being aimed at ease of maintenance and expandability, reliability, speed of performance, low cost of operation, and ultimately, growth and migration.
Planning for the future growth of the agency and particularly our image collection and agency web presence is a major consideration. At present we are very small, but if we are successful and continue to grow as we plan to, we will be faced with extremely rapid changes in the underlying requirements for hosting our web presence and delivering our images to our customers, and if we do not plan now for that future growth, it will overwhelm us when it happens.
Of all ecommerce, business oriented websites, a professional stock photography agency website places some of the most extreme technical demands upon the infrastructure of the website, exceeded possibly only by a video streaming and sharing website of the same general scale.
We require very significant online storage and bandwidth for image delivery, and the "compute power" necessary to search for and then deliver customized search result thumbnail pages is extremely high. Making the infrastructure "scalable" to meet the growth in demand, and to provide for "fail over" protection in case some functional part of the website fails adds a level of complication that most business ecommerce websites never have to deal with at the same level.
As an example, look at the number of SKU's (Stock Keeping Units) that a normal reasonably large scale online retailer like Land's End might have to maintain: there will be a base of a few thousand individual items, in a few different sizes and color choices each. Picade currently has (04 June 2007) 6769 images (SKU's) and aims to grow to around 500,000 selected images.
An online retailing customer will typically browse to find a product result set that will typically have as few as 3-7 "items" encompassing text and a thumbnail image for each item, with possibly a display of color choices in another image for the selection of items, all from a static html page (possibly generated dynamically on a regular basis from a database, but then cached).
The typical stock photography website customer will do a keyword database search involving potentially numerous, Boolean logic terms that will generate a dynamic result set of from 24 to 100 thumbnails.
The data transmission for the two different pages will be many times larger for a small stock photography image search result set like 24 images, and dramatically larger for a large scale 100 thumbnail result set as typically used by professional researchers, and database utilization to generate the result set is orders of magnitude greater as well.
Given that a database query for the stock photography website is done to generate each search result page for a customer, and is typically done once per day for the typical online retailer, the differential in database utilization is readily seen to be many orders of magnitude between the two types of sites.
Returning to the idea of growth and the need to plan for it, in our initial period of existence [i.e.: now] working out of our own pockets without any venture capital or loans, we have to use low cost shared web hosting to be able to have a web presence at all.
As we grow, we will very rapidly outgrow the capabilities offered by shared hosting, and will have to move first to a single dedicated server, then ultimately to many servers with distinct separate functions, all probably "co-located" within a larger hosting facility. At some point in that growth timeline it is certain that it will be an economic requirement to replace PhotoShelter as our search engine/online image host/ecommerce workflow provider and do all the same functions for ourselves.
All of that is much easier to do, less traumatic, and less costly in the long run if we properly plan for and structure what we do now, and that is what we are currently doing.
Michael Beasley