fotoLibra is an open access picture library / stock agency

Stock photography

Stock photography is the supply of photographs licensed for specific uses. It is used to fulfill the needs of creative assignments instead of hiring a photographer. Today, stock images can be presented in searchable online databases. They can be purchased and delivered online...

. It was founded in 2002, produced a beta site in March 2004 and launched commercially in January 2005. It sells rights-managed

Rights Managed

Rights Managed, or RM, in photography and the stock photo industry, refers to a copyright license which, if purchased by a user, allows the one time use of the photo as specified by the license. If the user wants to use the photo for other uses an additional license needs to be purchased. RM...

 and royalty-free

Royalty free

Royalty-Free, or RF, refers to the right to use copyrighted material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties for each use or per volume sold, or some time period of use or sales.-Computer standards:...

 images, with an approximate 80/20 split in favor of rights-managed. fotoLibra claims to be the first open access fully digital stock agency. In September 2008 it had over 20,000 member photographers and 5,000 registered buyers in 150 countries.

Concept

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 With a background in book publishing, he felt that publishers would have a need for previously unpublished photographs and for images that could not be taken again.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.

Features

fotoLibra provides the facilities of a digital stock agency. In addition, buyers can filter searches with a variety of parameters, including hexadecimal

Hexadecimal

In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal is a positional numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16. It uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols 0–9 to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F to represent values ten to fifteen...

 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

Escrow

An escrow is:* an arrangement made under contractual provisions between transacting parties, whereby an independent trusted third party receives and disburses money and/or documents for the transacting parties, with the timing of such disbursement by the third party dependent on the fulfillment of...

account to protect their interest. All pictures are vetted to ensure inappropriate content is not uploaded.

Membership

Standard membership of fotoLibra is free, and members can pay additional storage fees to upload large quantities of images.

Citations and Sources

Delwardel, Marjorie "fotoLibra teams up with Scoopt" Ping Wales, August 12th, 2006

Mendoza, Miles "Website of the Day" BBC Radio 2, January 19th, 2006

BAPLA "Directory" 2006

Creative Match "New Approach Brings Down Picture Buying Costs" June 16th, 2005

Khan, Basheera "fotoLibra gets it picture perfect" ITWales.com, June 9th, 2004