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Sign up for ASMP’s Find A Photo Service

ASMP has enhanced its Find A Photo portal to make it even more valuable to our members. The portal is designed to give you a simple, inexpensive way to place your stock images into the online marketplace to make sales.

The system will make it easy for you to display your stock photos to prospective buyers via the Internet and, at your option, to use its e-commerce functions to collect payment and deliver the image. At all times, you will have control of your images: license terms, pricing, quality and relationship with the customer. However, just as ASMP has done in the past with insurance, we are using the power of our numbers to obtain a price that’s significantly lower than market.

Above: Search results as a series of thumbnails. Below:Click one image to see its licensing info.

Go straight to the How To Sign Up page.

How the system works

From the buyer’s perspective, the new www.FindAPhoto.org site works much like any image portal. The buyer can enter one or more keywords into a search form, then view the results in the form of thumbnails. Clicking a thumbnail will bring up a larger version of the image, a link to the photographer’s web site and how-to-buy instructions.

If the searching process does not produce any suitable candidates (or even if it does), the buyer can go on to post a request on our Members Only Forum.

Two levels of service

The Basic service provides a core service at minimal cost. For a one-time setup fee of $50, you can upload up to 50 full-resolution images, although low-res files are also allowed. (You can also send in CDs or DVDs for bulk transfer.) As with any picture database, the images must be tagged with captions and keywords, so your Basic service includes software that makes keywording easy.

The Basic level connects the buyer directly to you by providing contact information and some instructions about how to arrange a license. You negotiate the pricing and usage rights directly with the client, and you deliver the image and bill the transaction.

The Enhanced service allows more images and supports real e-commerce. The cost is higher: besides the Basic setup fee, the database service provider (IPNStock) charges a service fee of $175 a year. In addition, IPNStock will charge a processing fee of 20% on each sale that is made through the e-commerce system. The package includes:

• More photos. You can have up to 250 full-resolution pictures in the system.

• Online price calculator. For each image, you can choose whether to let buyers use the self-service pricing tool or require them to contact you for pricing.

• E-commerce. The server will accept the buyer’s credit card, issue the license contract, and deliver the image file. You get a statement and a check at the end of the month.

• Slide show. Select any number of images for a "slide show" portfolio that can be accessed from your member-contact page in the system. You can have multiple slide shows, if you wish.

• Mailable lightboxes. Select a series of images into a lightbox list, then send the link to one or more prospective buyers.

Infrastructure

IPNStock is providing customized keywording tools, the hosting service, and the image-search and e-commerce engines. However, the system is not branded as an IPNStock site. Rather, it has the ASMP logo and look, and it has links to ASMP’s existing Find A Photo request service.

ASMP understands and expects that this first edition of the Find A Photo portal will show that future improvements are needed. But we don’t yet know what changes will turn out to be the most important. (More images per member? Paid staff to do keywording?) We will be able to change the variables after we see what the needs of ASMP members are.

Go on to the How To Sign Up pages.