We have recently made some website updates to help make the site navigation
8635d8ab-69fb-4897-91a1-a7018fd433ec|1|1.0
Tags:
We are pleased to announce the integration of royalty free images from the Microstock Agency StockFresh. They will be adding 100,000 images and we hope to see many more coming soon. Our robot has already started indexing the results and about 30% are being matched with images from other agencies. This is good news because StockFresh still sells stock photos for $1 for blog/web image users. So hopefully you can find the image you want at and agencies that is still cheap. Other microstock used to do that but most of the larger agencies have raised their prices. Especially iStockPhoto and Dreamstime, it is hard to get the cheaper price for popular images (on Dreamstime, the price of a photo goes up as the number of downloads goes up. Some images are $5 or more for the smallest size because they are very popular).
As always, we invite you to browse through our millions of royalty-free stock photos and illustrations. If you are a photographer looking to sell stock photos, take a look at our microstock agency review website.
052f043a-8b44-42bb-9738-2e8b8a5381a3|0|.0
We have finally started to add agency pricing information to our results. We have added pricing estimates for Fotolia and for Dreamstime. You can see teh estimates by clicking the pricing link on a details page.
The Dreamstime pricing estimates the pricing level and then gives prcing estimates based on that. Because the image may have jumped into the next level since the last time it was updated by the ImageTrail robot, this number is only an estimate. The Fotolia pricing and Dreamstime image pricing pages can be previewed form here, but will appear differently when from a details page like this grandmother and granddaughter image page.
As usual, the best way to know how much the image will cost is to clickthrough and look at the prices on the agency itself. We are continuing to add pricing for our other agencies and to add other agencies to the list. If you find errors in our estimates, please contact us or click the report image button on the image details page.
1bb47d48-7006-4a4c-ac59-52da19c21da2|0|.0
This has certainly been a busy month for me. We have been contacted by a few different agencies about listing their images. We have worked out a great partnership with LuckyOliver which I am pretty proud of. LuckyOliver has been one of my favorite "new finds". Their focus is truly a community site and they seem very skilled at building a brand.
Growth
The Image database is now over 500k images and I will be increasing the speed with which I let it grow. I have tried to be careful this far because I believe that "junk in / junk out" gets magnified in a database. I hope to see 1 million images by August.
5d7d6068-7f97-4aba-9683-76f99827fb4d|0|.0
Imagetrail has now been online for over six months! Things are growing, but not fast enough. We are in the process of contacting more agencies about listing their images, but the biggest need is marketing.
We have just started the seo push for the website and trying to get ourselves into Google and Yahoo in a strong way. We are also submitting the site to various web directories, such as the
Directory of Global Information and the
Photarium blog directory .
We are buying clicks through Google and Overture and having good success with spreading the word.
Seperating the Search Engine Worlds We have in the past combined the "recent searches" and "top searches" for Imagetrail and SafePix (the family friendly photo search). We will be shortly seperating the two list to prevent to much duplicate content and also prevent things like "
sexy images" form showing up on SafePix top list where "
family conversation" would be more appropriate.
Edit 2/17/2010: We have shutdown SafePix and improved the content filtering on Imagetrail.net itself. We don't allow most adult images to be displayed.
0bf7e620-44be-4ae0-829c-4c94dbff2692|0|.0
We (I can officially say we now) have started work on a
image categories page. This page will serve two purposes:
1) To help to wayward searcher find something cool to look at. Sometimes you need a few prompts in order to start your searches. A quick glance at this page and you should be on your way.
2) To help the search engines know what we have here. We have notices that the search engines are sending people to images that we have talked about. Soo... we decided to talk some more in a massive way.
If you can think of a major category that we have missed, please
let us know.
daf557f4-5c93-42ec-890b-6f11ee726197|0|.0
Tags:
I have started to realize that the deeper our indexing robot goes, the less it seems to be getting done. I think this is where we have to re-evaluate how we index images in our search engine.
This week we have finally reached 260,000 images and it seems that our pace is less impressive than when we began. However, it is in filling out the corners of the image database that we trully have a great variety. Each agency itself lists 500K - 1 Million images. However, many of those were accpeted in their days of "great need" and they really shouldn't have been. Our database only hold 50k or so from each agency, but we hope to have the best 300K form each and leave the junk alone.
How to distinguish the junk? (Mathematically or pragmatically)
We are now working on algorithms to distinguish a good image from a bad. The first round of this effort was for rankings purpose. It is still not perfect, but seems to do a descent job. The second round if for inclusion into the database. We don't want to chop off the hand that feeds us by saying no images with 0 downloads are allowed. That is not a good measure. So image downloads over time seems better (except in niches). So needless to say, if anyone has done research on this we would love to hear about it.
Marketing Our Image Search
We have begun our marketing push with the search engine. For now it is a grass roots efforts with the word hopefully spreading through forum posts, blogs and personal contacts. We are not quite ready to "pop the top" so to speak, but this will happen soon.
c01136f5-08cc-4b59-9760-dbbee09051ac|0|.0
I have just created and installed the top
image searches tag cloud. You can see it on the Top Searches pages as well as an abbreviated version on the
main image search page. Tag clouds are a concept made popular by
Flickr and have pretty much taken over the internet. But hey, they are cool. I am also interested in tracking the most popular photos on image trail. Soon I will be tracking image clicks and displaying the images that get the most clicks on the
popular searches page.
The next things I will be doing is installing another agencies and a lot of backend work. You will probably see a lot of image duplicates as I try and tune that system a bit. I am also falling a bit behind in the manual matching processes. Its time to hire an image matcher and pay them to do the manual labor stuff.
677943df-a516-442b-82ce-ab29dc5c91f0|0|.0
Our search engine has now indexed over 200,000 professional stock photos that are availible for sale throw 5 agencies. Hurry up and try our
new image search function.
Things are continuing to progress, each month we have many more visitors and lots of feedbakc on the system. Our goal is to have over 2 million images within six months and to be a great source for individuals and organizations looking for stock photos, stock illustrations and well... stock just about anything.
Things coming in the month of January-
* We will be adding one, maybe two more agencies to the database
* We will be indexing 100k-200k more images
* We will be rounding out some area of the site (more help, advanced search)
Things coming in February
* Another agency is coming on board
* Another 200K images
* Community responce features (report bad images, links, keyword matches, etc.)
Please check out the
main page. Dont be discouraged by the simple appearance, try a search and see our growing results.
983ec809-b29b-481b-b903-40ad368b72f0|0|.0
Our database now has over 140k images and it growing everyday. We are starting to fill out some of the "not-so-popular" keyword areas and grab some speciality images. I am always suprised at some of the great images that come in and are being sold on these affordable agencies.
Image Content Filtering (Nudity, Violence, etc, etc, etc) I am starting work on the content filtering system. I have decided to seperate the safe version of imageTrail onto a site called
www.safepix.net (
Family Safe Image Search) I did this so that organizations and families that want to "force" the use of safe searching can check based on the domain name. I will be allowing content filtering here, but inforcing it on the other domain.
The Nude-O-Meter I am trying to create a methodology to detect nudity with some degree of accuracy with out having to stare at the pictures. I am thinking about implementing a system much like SPAM filters use to check email messages. It would be a scoring system that attaches weights to certain words found in the title or keywords. Enough "nudy" type words and the image gets filtered. I am going to have to run a lot of tests and tune the system quite a bit to minimize false positives, but I think it can work.
I have thought about creating a test set of dat (10,000 images or so) and running the filter on them. I will have hand checked the images and then I can have the program decide what the best weights are for each for set. Hmmm.... Not sure....
c812aa7f-e09e-4142-9c65-6bb67b3b4e4a|0|.0