fotoLibra was an open access picture library / stock agency. It was founded in 2002, produced a beta site in March 2004 and launched commercially in January 2005. [1] [2] It sold rights-managed and royalty-free images, with an approximate 80/20 split in favor of rights-managed. fotoLibra claimed to be the first open access fully digital stock agency. In July 2014 it had over 12,000 member photographers and 5,000 registered buyers in 170 countries. The service ceased in June 2020.
The idea of fotoLibra came about when founder Gwyn Headley lost 120 years of his family’s photographs in a flood. With a background in book publishing, he felt that publishers would have a need for previously unpublished photographs and for images that could not be taken again. The original intention of the business was to provide a repository of family archives, but the ability to aggregate images uploaded from multiple sources and to make them available for download and purchase anywhere in the world caught the attention of contemporary photographers, and the company now operates largely as a general commercial digital picture library. [1] [2] [3]
fotoLibra provides the facilities of a digital stock agency. In addition, buyers can filter searches with a variety of parameters, including hexadecimal color searches. Members receive a minimum of 50% of the net sales receipts from picture sales and all sales income received is paid into an escrow account to protect their interest. All pictures are vetted to ensure inappropriate content is not uploaded.
VisConPro Ltd, trading as fotoLibra, closed for business on Monday 1 June 2020. [4]
A photographer is a person who uses photography makes photographs.
English Heritage is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places. These include prehistoric sites, medieval castles, Roman forts, and country houses.
Personality rights, sometimes referred to as the right of publicity, are rights for an individual to control the commercial use of their identity, such as name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal identifiers. They are generally considered as property rights, rather than personal rights, and so the validity of personality rights of publicity may survive the death of the individual to varying degrees, depending on the jurisdiction.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is a visual media company and supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video, and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets—creative professionals, the media, and corporate.
BENlabs, formerly BEN Group Inc, is a Los Angeles–based product placement, influencer marketing and licensing company. The company offers AI-driven product placement, influencer marketing services, music partnerships, rights clearance, and personality rights management services for the entertainment industry.
Stock photography is the supply of photographs that are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, and microstock photography. Conventional stock agencies charge from several hundred to several thousand US dollars per image, while microstock photography may sell for around US$0.25 cents. Professional stock photographers traditionally place their images with one or more stock agencies on a contractual basis, while stock agencies may accept the high-quality photos of amateur photographers through online submission.
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a common way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018.
Fine-art photography is photography created in line with the vision of the photographer as artist, using photography as a medium for creative expression. The goal of fine-art photography is to express an idea, a message, or an emotion. This stands in contrast to representational photography, such as photojournalism, which provides a documentary visual account of specific subjects and events, literally representing objective reality rather than the subjective intent of the photographer; and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services.
Microstock photography, also known as micropayment photography, is a part of the stock photography industry. What defines a company as a microstock photography company is that they (1) source their images almost exclusively via the Internet, (2) do so from a wider range of photographers than the traditional stock agencies, and (3) sell their images at a very low rate for a royalty-free (RF) image.
Shutterstock, Inc. is an American provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 10 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing. Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.
The intellectual property rights on photographs are protected in different jurisdictions by the laws governing copyright and moral rights. In some cases photography may be restricted by civil or criminal law. Publishing certain photographs can be restricted by privacy or other laws. Photography can be generally restricted in the interests of public morality and the protection of children.
National Geographic Image Collection, a division of the National Geographic Partners, a joint venture between the National Geographic Society and The Walt Disney Company, headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States, was a stock photography agency that managed and licensed one of the world's most comprehensive and unique collections of photographs and original artwork. It maintained a collection of more than 10 million digital images, transparencies, black-and-white prints, early auto chromes, and pieces of original artwork.
Wikimedia Commons, or simply Commons, is a wiki-based media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Construction Photography is a photo library and agency based in London, England. It was established in 2001 to provide the construction and built environment industries an alternative to multinational agencies such as Getty images and Corbis.
Africa Media Online is an organisation that enables African media professionals to reach international markets. Based in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the organisation provides online media library systems, professional digitisation services, digital imaging training, and access to a worldwide audience through their image library, previously known as africanpictures.net.
Maggie Diaz was an American-born Australian photographer who lived and worked in Melbourne from 1961. The Diaz Collection dates back to 1950s Chicago and the archive has been acquired by the State Library of Victoria, with work in the collections of the National Library of Australia and the National Gallery of Australia.
Alamy is a British privately owned stock photography agency launched in September 1999. Its headquarters are in Milton Park, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It has a development and operations centre at Technopark in Trivandrum, Kerala, India and a sales office in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
Photography in Sudan refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes the former territory of present-day South Sudan, as well as what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and some of the oldest photographs from the 1860s, taken during the Turkish-Egyptian rule (Turkiyya). As in other countries, the growing importance of photography for mass media like newspapers, as well as for amateur photographers has led to a wider photographic documentation and use of photographs in Sudan during the 20th century and beyond. In the 21st century, photography in Sudan has undergone important changes, mainly due to digital photography and distribution through social media and the Internet.
Wildlight was an Australian photo agency operating from the 1980s and specialising in imagery of that country.