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Image by photographer: Coffee999

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Image by photographer: uriy2007

Couple Wearing Rabbit Ears by iofoto

Last Thursday was Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival as it is literally called. The Chinese are serious about celebrating the new year, and the whole festival takes 15 days. The last day is the classical lantern festivals, when people light candles and send small lanterns into the sky.

The year of the Rabbit is traditionally associated with home and family, artistic pursuits and peace. It is also easier to make a good income in the Year of the Rabbit, than in the ferocious Year of the Tiger, which just ended.

At YAY the Chinese New Year brings a welcoming vacation to our employees in China.

过年好! (Happy New Year!)

Jan.

“Parasol” by Ivonnewierink

Hi everyone

We are currently working hard on the search experience here at Yay Micro. We have some pretty cool stuff coming up in the near future, and today we’re introducing color search – the Yay Way.

We are big fans of the “keep it simple – stupid” philosophy. When we were thinking about how to implement color search, there was a lot of really interesting ideas that arose. In the end we wanted to create something that was easy enough for everyone to use, but at the same time providing a powerful tool that would be useful.

We ended up with what I would call Google Image Search on steroids. If you are familiar with Google Image Search, you might have noticed that you can easily choose a color for your images, but only one. We wanted to take it a step further and give users the same user interface, but allow them to choose multiple colors that might want in an image. Also, we wanted to give them the option to exclude certain colors. We are quite happy with what we ended up, and now we want to know what you think about it. It’s our first version, and we will defenitly keep improving it to our users’ needs.

Some examples of what you can search for:
Blue and Yellow “Flowers”
Red and Brown, but not White “Woman”

So what do you think, leave a comment

Regards,
Bjorn

L:)

Hi everybody, and Happy New Year!

First I would like to apologize for a long time without any regular updates. Luckily, the reason for this is that we’re busy working on getting the sales up at YAY! We’re still small compared to the big sites, but we’re getting there!

The last couple of months we’ve been working on our affiliate program (read more here: http://yaymicro.com/affiliate), SEO,  R&D on our search,  and developing an API. We’re also in the process of adding  a new partner to our third-party program. (Read more about third party and how to apply: http://yaymicro.com/view.action?page=third-party-sales-program).

Soon our API is ready for use – and that’s what I’d like to get some feedback on. We’ve seen a need for more transparency in our industry, and my impression is that people feel they lack control of their property: their images.  Traditionally, in the image industry there’s been common practice to share images between agencies, often involving many agencies (resulting small royalties to the photographers – many earning less than a microstock-photographer on some images, but they try to keep this a secret ). With international sites, this sharing gets even more complicated, and it’s easy to feel a lack of control for a photographer, and for the image agencies as well.

We’ve decided to list all our partners for the API, and give you an option to Opt-out from the ones you don’t want to use. You’ll also get details on the commission for YAY, along with the percentage of commission provided to you. Our goal is that you’ll make at least as much on an API-sale as you would if the image was sold at YAY, but the amount will vary depending on the different agreements.

I’m wondering if there is any information or other aspects of the API that are important issues for photographers that we haven’t considered?

Thanks,

Linda

CEO, YAYmicro

Today’s image captures the magic of a Christmas tree, and the anticipation for Christmas Eve! Photo by Sandralise

Linda

Linda

Photo by ciarada

This photo by ibphoto gave a perfect example of how the light and temperature was this morning. Cold, clear and crisp.

Jan

Linda

In vector graphics information is stored as a collection of geometrical shapes. That means that you can open a vector graphics file and render it as large as you want. You can also change geometrical values without distorting the image or loose quality.

At YAY we have both EPS and SVG vector files. EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript and is the filetype that the Adobe program suite mostly support. EPS-files can be opened in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, as well as CorelDraw, GIMP and InkScape. All these programs can also save convert the EPS into JPEGs or your preferred format. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and is the preferred vector  file for web-applications. All major browsers support SVG. However, SVG is not supported in Photoshop. Though CorelDraw, Illustrator and Inkscape has native support.

InkScape is a program you should look into if you’re working with vectors and are in need of a free program. It is distributed under a free software license and is quite capable of doing almost everything you need to do with vector files.

So, I’ve picked a few examples to give you an idea of how vector files look:

Merry Christmas!

Jan

If you’re having trouble finding the Christmas Spirit this year, we at YAY can help you! Install our FREE  screensaver with beautiful Christmas images. Our screensaver features a selection of 100 great images from our database. The images selected are our personal favourites, which will give you a pinpoint to the images we appreciate.

Get your free screensaver now!

Our screensaver is compatible with both PC and Mac. It’s also very easy to install. Seriously, it couldn’t be better.

Jan

Affiliates can now work from home with a new stock photo affiliate program from the stock photo agency YAY Micro. The agency offers a 20% commission on all sales, and affiliates can offer customers a 20% discount coupon. Affiliates also have the chance to get a $5 bonus plus a chance to win a free iPad.

Today low price image agency YayMicro launches their new affiliate program. All affiliates get a 20% commission when promoting YAY and their images.

The 20% commission is offered on every sale, forever. This way one customer can provide a steady income for years. Clients are normally from ad agencies, papers, magazines, or they work as designers, freelancers, and within creative jobs. The images are used in design, to illustrate articles, in newsletters, annual reports, in blogs etc. Affiliates can offer quality royalty free images for one of the lowest prices available, and with a safe-to-use license for the client.

The affiliate program is considered to be one of the best in our industry, both on commission and on how easy it is to use. It should be painless and profitable for you – the more money you make, the more money we make, says CEO Linda L. Johannessen.

At YAY’s website there is more information on working from home, how to get started, ready-made banners, user instructions, and tips on how to use social media such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Readers can also learn how to make even more money with promoting the affiliate program. Affiliates get a 5% commission on all sales people you refer to the program makes.
Affiliates who join the program today also gets the chance to win a free iPad. All they have to do is to place a banner link on their homepage or blog.

Read more and watch a short video about being a YAY affiliate.

The press release

The talented guys over at Worldwide Panoramas AS, which share the same office as YAY, have been invited over, so this will indeed be a happening. If you’re looking into advanced photographic solution, you should check them out. They’re gigapixel photographies are very impressive!

A Julebord is kind of like the Scandinavian version of Thanksgiving, except for the turkey.

Merry Christmas!

Jan