Dr. Jackson Avery (actor Jesse Williams) from Grey's Anatomy as a Stock Photo Model!

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

Help – I Got an Image Rejected!

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

YAY! We Got 1 Million Images!

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!

Third Party Sales Program

Some photographers have been asking for more information on our third party sales program. Unfortunately, I’ve haven’t had the time to write more about how it works – until now. We’ve finally added a page with information on our 3rd party program.
To give a a short update, this is what the introduction says:

YayMicro offers a 3rd party sales program for our top photographers. This is an exclusive program where we promote and sell images through a growing network of partners. This requires no extra work for the contributor, but can generate a steady stream of revenue.

This program was introduced in January 2009 and has since then grown into one of our most profitable sales channels. There are a lot of image agencies in the world, and many of them are having trouble getting the content they want. We use our experience from the industry to collect photographers that fits an agency’s needs. YAY represents over 5466 photographers from around the world and has an image collection of 920 000. This brings us into an exclusive range of agencies, because most of the world’s image agencies have a rather small collection of their own – while they resell the content of other agencies.

These smaller agencies have until now been locked down for the average microstock contributor. We can help you get your collection to a range of different agencies around the world.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to send an email to contribute@yaymicro.com or comment this blogpost. We’ll soon start a new collection, so follow the blog and start making your own project folder now.

Jan

Do You Want to be a Guest Writer at YAY blog?

In order to expand out blog we’re currently looking for guest writers to join YAY blog.  If you are interested in writing at YAY blog, please send me an e-mail at linda@yaymicro.com. You’ll have to write in English (or Norwegian).

Cheers, Linda

An Early Spring Cleaning?

Some of you might have experienced images back in pending, and then either rejected or back in your portfolio.This is an ongoing process here at YAY. When we notice images lacking in either quality, keywords, description, or if we find there are too many similar images in your portfolio we’ll send the images back for re-evaluating.

These images are evaluated together with new uploads, and are not marked in any way. So, it’s as fair as we can make the process. I would advice all contributors to be careful with their keywords, as images appearing “out of place” are especially noticeable, and therefore more easily sent back for new evaluation. We are not going through the whole database; neither are we aiming this against any particular photographer. So it’s not an early spring cleaning, but a day to day process (as most cleaning is).

If you feel you’ve been faulty rejected, please e-mail me at linda@yaymicro.com, and I’ll be happy to look into it! Also feel free to e-mail us if you have any other questions at post@yaymicro.com.

Cheers, Linda