Greetings Friends,

Our recent trip to New York City found us attending the International PACA conference (Picture Archive Council of America) for four days, followed by our exhibiting at Picture House on October 20th.

PACA

PACA is always a nice opportunity to network with photo agency colleagues from throughout the world, to see what everyone’s doing and to try to get on the same page as the industry leaders. Many of the medium and smaller agencies share industry standards tips for transitioning in the digital age. Niche agencies, such as ourselves, have found that in order to endure in this ever-changing marketplace, we need to work together. More and more agencies are developing alliances with each other, in order to offer more images from one source. This is a worldwide trend which will only continue.

A panel of Art Buyers stated (again) how difficult it is to work with watermarks on comps – another assurance that our large, 2.5 megabyte non–watermarked comps have us going in the right direction. Further, we’ll soon be offering a visual search tool, which will enable researchers to search visually once a broad keyword search is initiated. We’ll have more on that once we’ve integrated it into our website.

Our goal is to provide ease of use on our website, so that you the buyer can find and download the images you need with the least amount of effort. Please let us know how we’re doing and if you have any thoughts or recommendations on how we can improve our service for you.

Picture House

Picture House followed the PACA conference. Located at the Tribeca Rooftop Penthouse, more than 70 photo agencies exhibited their websites, and 600 photo buyers from the NYC area attended. It was great to meet up with clients that I’ve worked with for years, some of whom I’ve never met first hand! Although a very long day, it’s a wonderful opportunity to meet new buyers and connect with old friends.

Under my colorful beach umbrella, Dave and I demonstrated our website, and in particular, the new visual search feature which we’ll soon be implementing. It was interesting to see everyone’s reaction to this cutting-edge technology, which we think will be helpful to everyone, especially art directors and designers working with conceptual projects.