The other day I was helping out a client looking for different types of people in our stock photo base. After working in the stock photo industry for some years you begin to recognize the different models, and you’d probably greet them as old friends if you ran into them on the street. Even when you have 10.000+ models in your image base, as we do now, you still recognize a surprising number of them!

So at first I didn’t stop to take a closer look when I saw a familiar face. But there was something about those blue eyes that made me click back to take a closer look. I thought to myself “This must be that Grey’s Anatomy guy, Avery, but is he a stock photo model”? I got Jan to check the model release, and it’s true.

Jesse Williams, who plays Jackson Avery in Grey’s Anatomy, is a stock photo model represented at Yaymicro.com!

Let’s enjoy his pictures while we wait for season 7, where he’ll play a leading role. First episode, “With You I’m Born Again” airs on September 24, at ABC.

Cheers, Linda

Third party payments for the second quarter has now been rolled out, and it’s showing a positive trend again. The increase was on average 25 %, which is absolutely decent. We are still expecting growth, especially among the newest members who hasn’t fully published all images yet.

The last few quarters has been quite steady in regards to payment from 3rd party partner, but it has not grown enough. This has been a concern for us, and we’ve taken several steps to make sure that the income from the program is increasing. The most significant change has been to add new sales channels in new markets. We have also started talks with other partners in order to add even more earnings to your account from this program.

If you have recently applied to the program, your images have not been shipped yet. We expect a new shipment will be ready in September, that will include new images from earlier contributors as well as all new contributors.

Please contact me directly if you have any questions!

Jan.

All images at YAY goes through a quality control. Normally this is done within 24 hours, but not during weekends.

Sometimes your image(s) will fail the approval process and get rejected. When images are rejected you’ll get one or more reasons for why we couldn’t accept your image into our database.

It is important not to take the rejections personally. It might feel harsh to find several images rejected, and rejected sometimes for reasons you don’t understand. Our reviewers looks at thousands of images each day, so mistakes will happen. If you feel wrongly rejected, please e-mail us and we’ll look into it.

You can view the list of most common rejections and explanations here.

You should try to look at rejections as possibilities for learning and improving. Creating great stock photos is a challenging process. By taking time to understand your rejection, and then working on improving your technique you’ll be one step closer to create better stock photo! Often you’ll find tips and inspiration in different stock forum, discussion groups, and on photo/photoshop tutorial sites. If you have tips for great sites, share it with the rest of us in the comment-field!

At YAY we have full-time, permanent reviewers solely working us. This might cost a bit more than freelance reviewers, but we find it easier and more reliable in terms of consistency, quality and possibilities for improvement.

So, if you have any questions or feedback about the review process, please e-mail us and help us improve our process!

Linda

We decided to close the forum after several severe spam attacks (from web robots). We’ve not decided if we’ll try to improve the forum technology, or if we’ll aim for other ways of communication – such as blog comments, twitter, e-mail, and maybe open a chat room for more casual interaction.  Do you have any suggestions or preferences?

And a Thank You to the users who notified us of the spam attacks!

Cheers, Linda

A team of photographers from the company 360systems Ltd from Hungary has recently published the largest photograph ever taken. The panoramic view of Budapest has a resolution of 71 gigapixels! The resolution of the image is 590508 x 120750 and it takes up a whopping 350 GB.

Photographing gigapixel images has become quite popular recently, with new world records set at high intervals. Large companies like Google, Microsoft and Sony have all sponsored teams who are doing gigapixel photography. Google has even worked with NASA in developing a motorized head which can easily be set up to photograph extremely large images.

The technique used for this kind of photography is basically to take a whole lot of images (often several thousand) and use a large computer to stitch the images together. The 71-gigapixel image was stitched together on a Dell Workstation over several days. The team took a total of over 20 000 images over several days to compile the image in the quality they wanted.

The amount of progress in the field of gigapixel photography, has also been noticed by scientists – which are now looking for ways to use the technology in different fields. Among other uses they are looking into the possibility of doing macro gigapixel photography.

Check out the following impressive images:
Budapest 71 Gigapixel
Corcovado 67 Gigapixels
Paris 26 Gigapixels
Prague 18 Gigapixels

Already available in English and Chinese, this week we released two new languages, Spanish and Dutch. According to Wikipedia this makes our stock photo site available to near two billion people!

“Manage globally, sell locally” is a well-known and popular business  philosophy adapted by the us at YAY. A crucial localization goal for a stock photo agency as YayMicro has been to reach people in their native tongue. Research and experience suggest that people prefer to use a stock photo site in their own language.

We are proud to have the top three languages: Chinese, Spanish and English at our stock photo agency. In addition we have smaller languages as Dutch and Norwegian. YayMicro.com will release several more languages the next year, continuing our global expansion, but keeping the stock photo buying experience localized for the end-user.

Cheers from us at YayMicro!

New Options for Buying Stock Photos - Now You Can Buy Stock Photos from Image Agency YayMicro.com in Spanish and Dutch

Read the press release

Thanks to our wonderful photographers, only two years after startup we’ve reached 1 million images in our image base!  As we say in our press release: We are proud and excited that so many talented photographers have decided to let us sell their images for them! Thank you everybody!

The wide range of images combined with usability and low prices are attracting new customers in great numbers – we expect to multiply sales in 2010.

Image No. 1 million by Stephanie Frey:

Read more about the image and take a look at some of the other images from Stephanie Frey.

Read the press release here. You can also download a PDF of the press release.

Congrats and cheers from all of us at YAY!

We’ve changes our approval process in order to process editorial content faster! As you all know, editorial news images often has a short life span, and should be uploaded and approved within hours. From today of all editorial images will be approved before creative images. If you have editorial news images of important events, feel free to e-mail us to ensure a fast approval.

Cheers,

Linda

We’ve just finished an upgrade of the software that generates previews of submitted vector files. This means that the color of newly submitted vectors will be better than those already in the database. Next step is to regenerate older previews, so that these also will have a better and brighter color. The upgrade also means that our servers can handle more vector files without increasing the server load.

We are also working on a site upgrade that will be specifically aimed at the checkout process. Our data shows that we loose too many customers in the last few steps of the checkout. The new layout will be a lot easier to navigate. We will live up to our promise to be the easiest online stock agency once again!

Jan