Pictorem – a place to sell your art?

I’ve been with Fine Art America for years, in fact, since 2011, and I now have 2759 images uploaded there and for sale. Over the years, I have earned around $4500 from the site, mainly on print sales although they also sell many other products. For the $30 annual fee, which provides you with your own personalized site, it has been pretty good for me. I wrote about my results on Fine Art America in quite a few posts on this site, but this one about using Social Media is one of the key ones. I’ve also written more recently about getting new followers for your portfolio blog and whether it is actually a goal that is worth aiming for – depending on your style of photography, it might not be worthwhile. My site over at Fine Art America is this one:

Fine Art America is reasonably easy to use, you upload images in batches of five – uploading and then selecting which gallery or collection it is to go into. All the other settings can be preset and added as defaults, including the pricing for many products. Strictly speaking you are supposed to check the alignment of your images on the various products, but as I’m after print sales, I never bother with that. The site reads the keywords, title and description that I enter in Lightroom without issue. Also, you can put an image in any number of collections so if it is a sunset and an image taken in Alaska, it will go into both. I don’t really think many people land here and go through many galleries – I believe that most buyers find an image on Google and go more directly to the image page itself. That is what I have gleaned from various answers on the FAA forum. FAA does place our images into Google searches and if a sale results from a click on one of those paid ads, FAA takes a share of the commission you would otherwise have earned.

Pictorem – a new entrant in the Print on Demand scene

I joined Pictorem back in the spring, and what attracted me was that they focused prints, of different types, and also had some great ways of displaying prints on the walls of different rooms to allow people to see the different sizes and how they might look. Finally, they have free shipping for the USA and Canada and while that means they have built that into the cost, it does make a difference, I believe when people are thinking of buying and getting to the shopping cart stage. They have different designs for the website front end. I chose a simple black version:

A friend of mine has the white background that displays the image title when you hover over it before clicking to see the image page:

The site and the company are a work in progress, I believe. When I joined, the import process used the file name as the title of the piece. And, if my memory is correct, they didn’t import all the keywords. I spoke to the owner and main developer and explained how my stock photo images were all set up with Titles, Descriptions and Keywords and it would be much easier if those were imported. That following weekend he developed the functionality and I have had no real issues in using that. Similarly, the process to upload an alternative image for an existing print was not smooth – that has been improved. I also asked about using my own URL for my personal page. After a month or two, that has now been launched and so https://www.steveheap.com takes you to my Pictorem site and works on all the pages. The format for the page is subtly different, with the shopping cart along the top, but he is working on different alternative designs for this header area. In addition, I believe they are working on updating and endhancing the gallery structure there as well. By the way, I have an affiliate link for Pictorem if you are thinking of signing up. It gives me a small commission if you choose one of the packages they offer, so please use it if you don’t mind!

What I like about Pictorem is the simple approach to uploading. If you have the metadata of title, description and keywords in place, you select the gallery that the images are to go into in the upload area and then select as many images as you like. All of them are uploaded, the relevant data added and they are placed in the right gallery. If you have a mixed gallery import, I either upload them in two groups, or upload them to the most common gallery and then use the keyword search to move the others into the right gallery. So much easier than FAA, especially for large number of images. I now have almost 1000 images in Pictorem – I have tended to be more selective here than at FAA – not sure if that will make any real difference in the long terms. So, ease of upload and focus on prints is the main attraction, I think.

The landing page shows the most popular images only. There are no ways currently to alter that and the “most popular” is some combination of sales and views. As you can see on Shelia’s page, if you keep adding galleries, they simply double up at the top of the page – not a great design. And there is no way to show a gallery view with a chosen image as the thumbnail. I think they will get there, but it is what it is. I personally am not too concerned. I think that many people will go to my site via a link to an image – either one of mine, one from Twitter or Instagram, or perhaps from a search on Google. Quite early on, I sold three images via Pictorem for almost $500 profit and that was before I had all my images there. You do get to know the name, address and email of the buyer which means that you could contact them – much different there from FAA. I did send an email to all three recently, but got no reply! I guess they thought it was spam? I asked them how they found my images, but of course I don’t know without a reply!

Packages on Pictorem

There is a free package for up to 250 artwork uploads, that is much better than FAA. Then there are two other Pro packages, that both give you unlimited uploads and your own Gallery (which can have your own URL). One is $60 a year, the other is $155 a year. The main difference is that the more expensive “Featured” account gives you more marketing with priority listing on their site and an Artist Showcase on mailing and social media. I have spoken to the CEO about this – he confirms that it is still a work in progress. They do marketing, of course, and do promote these artists, but he is not sure it is working as well as it should yet. I have signed up to the normal Premium package at $50 a year and will revisit this marketing package later.

Quality of the results

So, far, I don’t personally know, but I have ordered a 30×20 inch acrylic print of one of my images that is going to be displayed in a local gallery during an exhibition. With the artist 15% discount, the total price for this was $123, which I thought was pretty fair. I’ll update this once the print arrives to let you know what I think!

Summary

I think the free shipping is a big advantage of Pictorem and I think the new and flexible team really want to hear from contributors on how best to improve the site. By all means add any thoughts to the comments below and I will make sure the developers get to know of your ideas and new ones that I have. I think people are not really interested in my best work – they don’t want a picture of somewhere because it is taken by me. I think they want a picture of somewhere or of something and my work happens to catch their eye. As such, organizing the landing page is not high on my priorities. I do like the effective search function so you can send people just to the images of Morgantown, for example, with a search URL and they also provide those little QR codes so you can quickly point someone at a specific image. It would be nice to have a QR code of a search result – perhaps that could be an improvement in the future. The pricing seems fair, and the identification of the buyers could prove useful as well. Quality I will judge soon, but none of the three orders were returned so that is a good sign. So far so good! Again, here is my link in case you are interested in signing up! And if you do become a contributor there, I formed a group on Facebook to allow us to promote our art. It is called Pictorem Artists and feel free to join and post your own images and links to your Pictorem site.