Here we are heading into 2012, and with picNiche heading for 4 full years it’s looking like an exciting one to come
To mark the new year, I figured it would be a good time to talk a bit about what makes up the entire suite of ‘picNiche’ now, to brag a bit about recent improvements and outline my plans for 2012 with all of this stuff:
The picWorkflow retouching service should be along within the first month or two of the year
Review service will be added for agencies to reduce reviewing costs (and provide better and more ‘actionable’ feedback for photographers)
To improve workflow a LOT… picWorkflow will soon have an agency-api so they can ask picWorkflow for data about an image during submission
Free storage (currently 7 days) will be extended significantly (secured backup storage will still be available for additional payment.
Pre-review service for photographers so you can have someone else select which images should go where and provide you feedback on improving your portfolio
Geo-tagging interface is in-development
SEO-friendly portfolio mini-sites will be coming to help increase the search-engine visibility of your images on the microstock agencies.
I’m also looking at some social-media stuff, though using it in a non-spammy way is hard as I’d like to release something genuinely useful (not the spambots most microstock sites are doing already).
‘Social’ and promotion distribution (Flickr, Zazzle, etc etc) with watermarking and promo-metadata
Shoot management and performance metrics (also toying with the idea of putting a model-user type in there too so your TFD models can download their images directly in web-friendly sizes)
I’m also discussing partnering with the excellent Stock Performer to include microstock earnings stats into picWorkflow to really bring together some useful charts and the like for anyone who also uses their tool. (Soooo glad they’ve built it, and in a very innovative way… best possiblity I’ve seen yet for reliable earnings-stats collection)
picNiche toolbars:
I’m spending a LOT of time on picWorkflow at the moment, and haven’t spent much time on the picNiche toolbars in 2011, though with picWorkflow finally becoming ‘usefully profitable’, by march/april I should be able to hire someone (a freelancer at least) to help me do some updates to the toolbars…
The picNiche microstock contributor toolbar will be rewritten (mostly from scratch) to update the look-and-feel to match modern browser styling (a lot has changed in the last 4 years)
The toolbars will also get a ‘news-like’ panel to easily keep up-to-date with Microstock news and events
The microstock contributor toolbar will be ported to Chrome (at least it’s core functions)
The picNiche website will get a rebuild (moving from .Net to PHP) and will make some performance tweaks so it runs faster
The picNiche research tools will also be better integrated into the picWorkflow keywording UI and a new picWorkflow ‘research’ page.
Others:
The Microstock Powersearch Android app will be ported to iPhone
The Free-stock-photo search addons will be improved with more focus on the ‘upsell’
The Microstock search apps/addons will get more agencies added, and sponsored ‘default-search’ positions
I am talking to a few agencies about vastly improving the submission process from picWorkflow and looking forward to MUCH easier workflow for photographers by the end of the coming year
Well 2011 has been a MASSIVE year for me, for picNiche and picWorkflow… I wish you a fantastic 2012 too! Let me know anything else you’d like to see coming to any of my tools/sites/services and I’ll see what I can do!
Welcome to 2012 – picNiche State of the Union
Here we are heading into 2012, and with picNiche heading for 4 full years it’s looking like an exciting one to come
To mark the new year, I figured it would be a good time to talk a bit about what makes up the entire suite of ‘picNiche’ now, to brag a bit about recent improvements and outline my plans for 2012 with all of this stuff:
What makes up the entire picNiche collection?
What happened in 2011?
What’s coming in 2012?
Well 2011 has been a MASSIVE year for me, for picNiche and picWorkflow… I wish you a fantastic 2012 too! Let me know anything else you’d like to see coming to any of my tools/sites/services and I’ll see what I can do!
Happy New Year!
Related posts: