PurePhoto – new site for sharing and selling prints
I saw an article in Professional Photographer last month about a new site that is aimed at creating a community of artists displaying and selling their works of art. The team behind it is quite new – it launched in January – but it appears to be very professionally created and organized. The initial membership is free and you can upload and share 2GB of files. Each one is restricted to 15MB. The images are “Right-click” protected, and the terms of the site appear fair. For $29 for the first year and $49 for future years, you can have unlimited storage and the ability to upload larger images. Since I originally joined in mid May, the terms have changed – you used to have a Pro account to be able to sell images. This has now changed and free members can put forward their images for sale in the Members area (you choose the pricing), and a selection of those will be “curated.” To keep the standards high, the better images are curated by a team of artists/agents and if they are chosen, the site does the marketing of those images. Some of the ones already for sale are very good (and expensive at $2700!):
Peter Eastway Print
The site lets you create your own collections, share individual images into one of the many groups that have been put in place, look at images individually or as part of a slide show – in fact a wide range of professional features.
The big question – will any images sell? Too early for me yet, and I still have the free membership, but have recently put forward a couple of images into the Member sale area (mid June).
Watch this space!
Update 15 June 2011: Unfortunately not a lot to report! My Photographer icon made its way to the home page (each new photographer is shown in a block of icons to tempt the watching public to have a look at their images), but so far, no interest in my images in any way. One of the owners made a comment that he liked one of my isolated cat shots and would like to form a group for cat pictures, and that group is now in place with a couple of my other images uploaded into that collection, but no discussions in the groups. I think their aim is to build more of a community, and I will spend more time around the site to see if I can create some discussion, but there is not a lot of sign of action so far. It is a pity they don’t have a forum where their photographers could share experiences – maybe I will email the site owners and suggest that!
I also suggested that the site should read the metadata from uploaded files – at the moment you have to add a title, description and keywords manually. I’ve been told that they have that under development – they are definitely trying!
Thank you for this post and for providing an update – I have been scouring the web for some genuine first-hand feedback about the PurePhoto site, and so far all I’ve seen are preliminary reviews. I’m hoping to read some success stories, or at least see some indication of how well the prints are selling through the PurePhoto portal, but as your update suggests, so far the service seems to have seen only moderate traffic, and I suspect that most of that is from fellow photographers, not print collectors!