ImageTrail - Stock Photo Search Engine Notes

Now the real fun begins

2007-08-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

After the recent interview I have with Andy from StockPhotoTalk, I have received and contacted many of the major microstock agencies. I have worked out better downloaded and partnerships with Dreamstime, 123RF, StockXpert, LuckyOliver, and Fotolia.

WEW!

Things are start to go really well, the image database now has 600,000 images from the different agencies. I am hoping to have 2 million in by the end of September. Wish me luck!

June of Fire

2007-06-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

This has certainly been a busy month for me. We have been contacted by a few different agencies about listing their images. We have worked out a great partnership with LuckyOliver which I am pretty proud of. LuckyOliver has been one of my favorite "new finds". Their focus is truly a community site and they seem very skilled at building a brand.

Growth

The Image database is now over 500k images and I will be increasing the speed with which I let it grow. I have tried to be careful this far because I believe that "junk in / junk out" gets magnified in a database. I hope to see 1 million images by August.

NY Times mention Fotolia and iStock as Corbis competitors

2007-04-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

The New York Times wrote a large article about Bill Gate's Corbis Images. They mentioned microstock and its entrance as a challenge to the stock photography community. As Imagetrail will hopefully someday prove, the results of microstock photography are a little more than "amatuer or semi-professional". In my opinion much of what is found on microstock site is more professional. The interfaces are often harder to deal with, but they also are improving.

Time will tell whether microstock will conquer, or just co-exist. There will always be different needs and different markets in stock imagery.

"What Corbis did not foresee was the rise of so-called microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. These sites take advantage of the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, or turning to the online masses for free or low-cost submissions. Thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers armed with high-quality digital cameras and a copy of Photoshop contribute photographs to microstock sites, which often charge $1 to $5 an image."

Read the article @ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/10corbis.html

Its all about the marketing

2007-04-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

Imagetrail has now been online for over six months! Things are growing, but not fast enough. We are in the process of contacting more agencies about listing their images, but the biggest need is marketing.

We have just started the seo push for the website and trying to get ourselves into Google and Yahoo in a strong way. We are also submitting the site to various web directories, such as the Directory of Global Information and the Photarium blog directory .

We are buying clicks through Google and Overture and having good success with spreading the word.

Seperating the Search Engine Worlds

We have in the past combined the "recent searches" and "top searches" for Imagetrail and SafePix (the family friendly photo search). We will be shortly seperating the two list to prevent to much duplicate content and also prevent things like "sexy images" form showing up on SafePix top list where "family conversation" would be more appropriate.

Progress and Painful Changes

2007-04-04T10:45:00.001-07:00

Everything Changes

Since I have started working on this website I have had frequent changes in my interface with the individual stock image agencies. Some agencies have remained relatively constant. StockXpert makes few adjustments to their site and has worked rather consitantly. Dreamstime and Fotolia on the other hand seems always to be shifting. Because of the specialized image search robot requird to run this site, it is difficult to keep things working. However, I must say that while changes in the agencies are kind of annoying, they are generally good for the end consumer.

Popular Image Searches

Some recently popular searches have been for church monastery photos and (not surprisingly) easter images. There has also been a surge in people looking for fireworks. July 4th is not for another 3 months! Maybe summer in general brings out these images.

Image Categories

2007-02-19T10:44:00.000-08:00

We (I can officially say we now) have started work on a image categories page. This page will serve two purposes:
1) To help to wayward searcher find something cool to look at.
Sometimes you need a few prompts in order to start your searches. A quick glance at this page and you should be on your way.
2) To help the search engines know what we have here.
We have notices that the search engines are sending people to images that we have talked about. Soo... we decided to talk some more in a massive way.

If you can think of a major category that we have missed, please let us know.

The New and The Strange

2007-02-06T18:13:00.000-08:00

As usual I keep my eye on the search trends. For one to see what types of photos people are buying (the photographer in me) and secondly, just for the fun of it.

This week saw a huge surge in Iraq images and other war type images. This is no large surprise with the war continue to take center stage in the US and all over the world. On the other hand, a large amount of users were very interested in piano playing photos and cow milking photos. Hmm.... I hope this is all not just one really strange person.

260,000, but nobody cares

2007-02-05T14:33:00.000-08:00

I have started to realize that the deeper our indexing robot goes, the less it seems to be getting done. I think this is where we have to re-evaluate how we index images in our search engine.

This week we have finally reached 260,000 images and it seems that our pace is less impressive than when we began. However, it is in filling out the corners of the image database that we trully have a great variety. Each agency itself lists 500K - 1 Million images. However, many of those were accpeted in their days of "great need" and they really shouldn't have been. Our database only hold 50k or so from each agency, but we hope to have the best 300K form each and leave the junk alone.

How to distinguish the junk? (Mathematically or pragmatically)

We are now working on algorithms to distinguish a good image from a bad. The first round of this effort was for rankings purpose. It is still not perfect, but seems to do a descent job. The second round if for inclusion into the database. We don't want to chop off the hand that feeds us by saying no images with 0 downloads are allowed. That is not a good measure. So image downloads over time seems better (except in niches). So needless to say, if anyone has done research on this we would love to hear about it.

Marketing Our Image Search

We have begun our marketing push with the search engine. For now it is a grass roots efforts with the word hopefully spreading through forum posts, blogs and personal contacts. We are not quite ready to "pop the top" so to speak, but this will happen soon.

Not just credit cards come with points

2007-01-26T13:20:00.000-08:00

Recently 123rf added a new flavor of fun to buying images. Checkout their point system . Just by buying enough images you can earn yourself anything from a wireless mouse to an 80GB ipod. Now that is pretty cool.

Each agency is trying to distinguish themselves and price is not the only way to do it. You can buy a subscription from

A few words about image use and our search engine

2007-01-18T15:26:00.000-08:00

I have had a few questions about our policy for using images to promote this site. Well, here is the promotional image usage policy:

No photographers (except myself and patners) have made any agreement with me about their images.We list the images of several stock agencies (a) by their good graces and (b) because we bring them new customers. We do have affiliate links attached to the many of the images that are indexed and this is how we support the site.

However, we do not show any images outside of the search (and popular searches) area without first purchasing a license to that image. The car image used in the banner above was purchased from Fotolia, as where several other images that we have used. If you would like to donate an image for promotional use, please contact us.

The Search Engine

This site is meant to be as transparent as possible, it is not a stock photo agency, but an image search engine. We don't list any image, only those sold by online affordable stock photo agencies (or microstock agencies). The robot searches and browses the agencies for new and quality images and then stores them by keywords in our database. We rank images according to several factor including internal and external popularity. We will periodically "trim the fat" and remove images that don't seem to aquire clicks on this site or views/sales on the listing agencies site.

Pleaes post questions.

The one worth mentioning

2007-01-15T15:28:00.000-08:00

Between the two stock photography websites that I run (MicroStock Forum for photographers and ImageTrail for designers) I receive a lot of emails about new agencies. They are always nice, but in all honestly they mostly look the same. Many of them were created with the famous kTools PhotoStore (which is a pretty nice product really).

The once the stands out to me is LuckyOliver. It is a relatively new agency (popped up on my radar about 5 months ago. The whole site is themed around a carnival. This sounds strange, but it has a certain appeal to it. Everybody is nice and interactive, their database is still small, but quickly growing.

The other interesting thing is that I have continual reports of actual sales. Setting up a stock photography agency with 5K-10K images isn't easy, but selling even 10 images is even harder. So they must be doing some good promotional work. Maybe they will tell me their secret.

Now don't expect Dreamstime or Shutterstock type earnings tomorrow, but if you are looking to diversify, I would recommend Lucky Oliver as a survivor (and yes, there have been many casualities).

What is Stock Photography?

2007-01-11T15:28:00.000-08:00

Several times in the last couples week I have been asked "what exactly is stock photography?" At first I laugh because I think the anser is simple, and then I realize that to define it isn't so easy. So instead of a Websters definition (a direct answers) let me beat around the bush a beat

Stock Images Are All Around Us

The last time you drove you probably saw a billboard with a person (maybe an attractive female or an elderly couple) on it. Chances are you just saw stock photography. When you surf the web and see images to illustrate a point or to go along with an article chances are you just say some stock photography.

What Can I Do With Stock Photography?

Because of recent changes in the photogaphy market, many of these images that used to cost $100 or more are now availible for less than $5 (normal just $1 for web sized images). This means that instead of just having boring old text on your blog, you can add an image to spice it up a bit. Like this!

There are endless uses for stock photos (and illustrations), the photos I have shot have been used on websites, on church programs, in bridal show advertisements and on baby shower invitations.

Because of the low pricing of microstock photos (this is the "techie" name of this cheap photos) they are being used by many non-profit organizations and other groups that couldn't afford professional stock photography until now.

So, in conclusions: Stock photography is all around us, and we can use it to improve our designs for work, play or just about anything. If you want to make your school project look cool, add a professional image and impress your teachers.

PS: I should note that you must check the license of the agency you download from. While most uses of a photo are totally allowed, there are some restrictions. Each agency is different and you should contact them if you have licensing questions.

credits: spice image © Robert Ahrens(Fotolia)

The ImageTrail Search Engine has 200K images

2007-01-08T06:48:00.000-08:00

Our search engine has now indexed over 200,000 professional stock photos that are availible for sale throw 5 agencies. Hurry up and try our new image search function.

Things are continuing to progress, each month we have many more visitors and lots of feedbakc on the system. Our goal is to have over 2 million images within six months and to be a great source for individuals and organizations looking for stock photos, stock illustrations and well... stock just about anything.

Things coming in the month of January-
* We will be adding one, maybe two more agencies to the database
* We will be indexing 100k-200k more images
* We will be rounding out some area of the site (more help, advanced search)

Things coming in February
* Another agency is coming on board
* Another 200K images
* Community responce features (report bad images, links, keyword matches, etc.)

Please check out the main page. Dont be discouraged by the simple appearance, try a search and see our growing results.

Slow Agencies

2007-01-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

The most frustrating thing about the feedback that I have received is that mos tof it is out of my control: SPEED

ImageTrail itself seems very responsive, but when people click the image to bo purchase, they are met with 10-40sec delays. This is frustrating as I am trying to bring business and NEW clients to these agencies. The delay seems only to be on loading the first page, after that the sites seem more responsive. You would think a little optimization would be good. The worst sites for speed are Fotolia & CanStock.

140,000 images indexed and more features

2007-01-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

Our database now has over 140k images and it growing everyday. We are starting to fill out some of the "not-so-popular" keyword areas and grab some speciality images. I am always suprised at some of the great images that come in and are being sold on these affordable agencies.

Image Content Filtering (Nudity, Violence, etc, etc, etc)

I am starting work on the content filtering system. I have decided to seperate the safe version of imageTrail onto a site called www.safepix.net (Family Safe Image Search) I did this so that organizations and families that want to "force" the use of safe searching can check based on the domain name. I will be allowing content filtering here, but inforcing it on the other domain.

The Nude-O-Meter

I am trying to create a methodology to detect nudity with some degree of accuracy with out having to stare at the pictures. I am thinking about implementing a system much like SPAM filters use to check email messages. It would be a scoring system that attaches weights to certain words found in the title or keywords. Enough "nudy" type words and the image gets filtered. I am going to have to run a lot of tests and tune the system quite a bit to minimize false positives, but I think it can work.

I have thought about creating a test set of dat (10,000 images or so) and running the filter on them. I will have hand checked the images and then I can have the program decide what the best weights are for each for set. Hmmm.... Not sure....

The Truth About Keywords

2006-12-27T13:21:00.000-08:00

When iStockPhoto first came up with its disambiguation concept I cried as a photographer. The idea was that each word in English (and any other language) has several meanings and therefore in order to return the best results for a given search, keywords aren't enough. Each keyword must by disambiguated by choosing a phrase with the correct meaning.

Coming Around

I am starting to come around with the concept as I put together this search engine. I like to look through the deep searches and see what cool images the DB has added each morning. Last night the robot looked for human brain, jewelry, and Boston. I found it interesting to look through the photos and sometimes say "Huh, what does this have to do with Boston?" I realized that although they are trully annoying photographers (to the point of many leaving) they are making the search more relavant for designers. Lucky for me, I'm not that popular, nor complex yet.

Boston Images

Many of the images do in fact make sense, but not directly. There are pictures of the famous buildings and parks, and then pictures of Boston terriers and finally there are a few image that although I understand the keyword, it is rather inappropriate. For example the single isolated maple leaf (which I am sure fell from a tree located in Boston). Or you may get a picture of a hand holding a newspaper (Maybe is ways the Boston Globe?).

Community Keyword Reporting

I think I will be implement a "community tool" to the site that allows people to report bad keyword matches. If you find something that you can't imagine relates to your keywords, you be able to vote against that match and with a couple votes the image will be removed. I am a little scared of things like this because people can cause more harm than good, but I'll continue to consider it.

End of 2006

2006-12-26T09:39:00.000-08:00

The database has reach over 110K images with close to 130k hits (number of image link with agencies). There are 20k duplicate images being sold on multiple agencies. This margin is getting larger, soon there will be 203 time as many image hits and images. I find that many images are being sold on all 5 agencies that I have listed. It takes a while for the robot to find them, but once it fins them on two agencies, the others seem to come rather quickly.

Recent Deep Searches

I have started a deep search algorithm that will plow into a specific keyword and try and grab out everything that is availible on all the sites (at least everything that is good quality).

Recent Deep Image Searches

3D Home Images

Modern Interior Photos

Phone illustration images

Prom Related Photos

Deep searches are based on what people look for that we don't seem to have. If the engine sees enough requests for a specific keyword phrase that doesn't come up with anything, it will get queued for a deep search. Sometimes there are no images returned, simple because there are no stock images on any agencies that fit that keyword. Often however our image search engine simply hasn't indexed them yet.

Cool Images

2006-12-21T15:28:00.000-08:00

The robot just indexed a great set of sword images. Take a look.

Chrismas Update

2006-12-21T15:16:00.000-08:00

I think this will probably be the last set of updates before Christmas time. I have made a ton of changes today and here is a small list

Search Sorting

You can now sort your searches by downloads (the sum of all downloads at each agency) or date. Or course the default option is "Best Match" whatever that may be.

Popular and Recent Searches

I am working on the popular and recent searches page. Recent searches show up, popular images are still on their way. I also plan to include a "Featured Image" strip on the front page. Popular searches will no longer include what the robot searches for (an oppsss from a while ago). Just because my root thinks their are cool, doesn't mean they actually are. I still need to filter out the common words from the list, such as 3d, background, icon, design, etc.

Better Paging

Instead of showing all 400 pages (if thee are 10000 images for your keyword), I only show the 10 pages of images around where you are looking. This change has been in the works for a long time, but my friend convinced me it really needed to be complete before we went any further.

Nearing Usable

2006-12-01T19:45:00.000-08:00

After getting a lot of feedback about the original design, we are getting to a near usable index. I can added CanStockPhoto to the search results and continue to organize and optimize everything. My new database server is working well and we have redone the searching rankings and algorithm. Hopefully people report gooed results.

Promotion

I have started telling the people who use my free images on the stck.xcng site about Image Trail. Many have sent in god comments, but there is still limited traffic. I will continue to tell people about the new engine and see if they actually will use it. While the primary motivation is obvious the earned income through referrals, I really do want to have a good tool for people who want to quickly search multiple image agencies from one spot.

Image Database Seperation

2006-11-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

In order to return the most relevant results quickly I have determined that the mySQL server with my hosting company (or any other shared hosting company for that matter) won't be sufficient. I am setting up my own database server in order to be able to have strict control over limits and indexing.

Over 45k images have been added and many duplicates have been matched. The search results will now show some images sold on multiple agencies. I am trying to simplify the interface, but allow things such as "Report Bad Keyword Match" and "Report Broken Link". Still working on the final interface.

30,000 images and counting

2006-11-02T16:23:00.000-08:00

The ImageTrail Search Engine database now has 30,000 images and increasing every moment (really it is). I am now working to optimize the image robot to not stress the image agencies to much. I run most queries at night and track results I have seen before. Images currently show in the search results come from: Fotolia, Dreamstime, StockXpert & 123RF.

Decisions, decisions

I have talked to both BigStock and ShutterStock and neither one allow referral links straight to images. That didn't make much sense, but basically I can't send a user straight to an image on their agency and get crdit for it. So I am starting to wonder if I should include them anyway for the community sake, or leave them out hoping for a better deal later.

Subscription Only Images?

Some agencies such as ShutterStock only sell images with a subscription model. Af first I intended to include them in the results with a little "S" for subscription only. However, I am thinking differently now. The point of ImageTrail is to allow you a lot of options from many different agencies. However, if you have a subscription at Shutterstock at the rate of $80/mo (something like that), you are not very likely to look elsewhere for images unless you have to. Open to ideas here....

Automatic Duplicate Image Detection

2006-10-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

Success, or at least the beginnings

A magician never reveals his secrets. I would hate to give away everything that I have come up with but I think I have found a way to automatically detect and match 90% of the duplicate images in the database. I am creating a way that I can have an Admin review the detected images for errors. I am now going to automatically have all new images search for duplicates.

Hopefully I am not jumping the gun here, because this is the single biggest issue with the database. Duplicate images not only mean frustrating results, but also extra junk in the DB and slower queries.