SnapVillage, owned by Corbis, is one of a host of 'microstock' sites for inexpensive downloads of stock photos.
(Credit: SnapVillage)SnapVillage, a microstock site founded in June by stock-art sales company Corbis to compete with rivals such as Fotolia and Getty Images' iStockphoto, has expanded to include international sales.
Although the site now works beyond the United States, the Web site is English-only for now. The company plans to localize with more languages later, a representative said. The site is still officially in beta testing.
The site receives about 10,000 new image uploads a week, SnapVillage said in a statement Wednesday. Although there are several rivals already better established, Corbis believed it would be better off starting its own site from scratch.
The company wouldn't release specific download statistics, but said sales are growing. In the last three months, the number of image downloads per week has increased by a factor of 8 and the number of new accounts created per week has increased 60 percent.
SnapVillage, the brand-new microstock from late entrant Corbis, has just fired up a revamped Web site, and it features some notable changes for photographers--chiefly, the ability to upload images with IPTC metadata such as captions and keywords. But the more interesting information from the company is in the future: the potential for raw-image support at SnapVillage, which I just wrote about at CNET News.com.
SnapVillage has revamped its beta microstock site for selling photos.
(Credit: SnapVillage)SnapVillage has added support for Adobe Systems' XMP, which can record raw-file settings as well as other metadata. Part of the reason for the move was that it would make it easier to handle raw images.
Raw images are more flexible than JPEGs, but they need to be processed before they can be used in brochures, ads, Web sites or other common microstock markets. It's rare for microstocks to support raw images, which are typically in proprietary file formats that vary from one camera maker and model to the next.
Also coming up is a new Java-based upload tool that can handle 150-200MB worth of images and international sales. SnapVillage expects that will help bump the current library of images from about 60,000 today to hundreds of thousands by the end of the year.
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