Online Image Sales for
Artists and Photographers

The Image Archive

Add a fully searchable Image Archive website to your portfolio website to market, sell and deliver up to 5000 images under your own brand, commission free.

The Pro Account’s Image Archive lets you create a separate website to efficiently sell and manage up to 5000 images in up to 3.5 GBs of personal photo storage. Managing 1000s of images online requires a powerful image management system that can help you organize and categorize images easily and streamline repetitive tasks. The Image Archive has 100s of pro-level features designed to let you organize images, manage clients and client areas, process online orders, respond to inquiries, and more. It includes virtually everything you will find in a feature rich agency style website, but under your own brand and full control.

The Image Archive allows your clients to easily find and make image selections with the ability to save their selections in one or more private lightboxes, make pricing requests, order online and immediately retrieve images (with automated payment process setting), review assignment work using custom FLASH slideshows, access private client areas and more. You will be equally impressed with tools like a hierarchical keyword suggestion system and comprehensive image management tasks that allow you to automate repetitive tasks such as uploading images, keywording, pricing, captioning, categorizing, resizing, moving images to different folders and more. If you are a professional stock photographer who needs to maintain a large number of folders and categories you will be impressed with our image library categorization features that let you organize your images in unlimited folder/ subfolders using any number of category/subcategories.

Search Engine Smart

The pages generated by your searchable Image Archive website are easily indexed by search engines to boost your online image marketing efforts and exposure.

No Commissions in Your Image Archive

No Commissions here... While there are plenty of reasons for artists and photographers to join commission based agencies and/or online communities, we think that creating your own independent Image Archive should not come with the possibility that your images may be sold under a different name. With The Pro Account’s Image Archive you will remain in control of your affiliations, your brand and the benefits you derive from your marketing efforts.

Affordable

If you do not have a portfolio website, The Pro Account can give you both a presentation portfolio website and a self branded searchable Image Archive website for only $695/yr plus a one time fee of $95. If you already have a portfolio website and are looking for a way to sell your images or stock photography or a way to maintain full featured client areas, The Pro Account can give you all the functionality you are missing and more. If you order during our regular business hours (M-F, 9-5 EST) we can have your self branded Image Archive running in only 2 business days.

Feature Highlights of the Image Archive	See comprehensive feature list
Launch your own searchable Image bank with up to 5000 images
Create client areas with comprehensive lightbox software functionality plus drag & drop and rating
Create interactive client presentations to preview assignment work
Give your clients a full featured workspace to manage selections, inquiries, orders, and more
Launch a self-branded stock photography website
Sell licensed images, royalty free, stock, and prints in a stand-alone website
Create custom prices for rights managed image pricing requests
Retain pricing, marketing and branding control over your images – no commissions
Streamline online image keywording, photo captioning, and other repetitive tasks
Have a portfolio website? Add an Image Archive website to manage client areas, sell stock and more
Deploy your own photo agency style website in as little as 2 business days
No software to install, no servers to maintain & free updates included

The Client’s Experience - a Sample Scenario

Prospective clients will access your Image Archive website because of your marketing efforts, and/or your agent’s marketing efforts, and because of your Image Archive’s metadata. Each one of your Image Archive website pages is packed full of metadata consisting of the captioning and keywords you assign to each image. This metadata makes each page highly relevant to search engines boosts your online exposure.

As your clients first enter your Image Archive website they will see the public areas you created. Once they login they will see their own panel that lists all of their private image folders, inquiries, prior orders, saved selections and more.

Site visitors can search or browse to locate images and can narrow down search results specifying categories or other search criteria. Image selections can be saved to a new or existing private lightbox.

The way you list image use and pricing in your Image Archive may or may not match a particular site visitor’s requirements. If that is the case, your site visitor can use the built-in functionality of The Image Archive to start a two-way communication with you that allows them to turn their saved selections into an inquiry. The Image Archive fully documents your site visitor’s requests and your responses. This two-way communication typically ends when you assign the image a custom price. At that point, your client can make a purchase at the agreed upon price until your custom quote expires. Client orders may consist of a mix of custom and standard prices mixing royalty free images with licensed images with print orders and images for download.

If you select to use the automated payment processing option with your Image Archive (i.e. Paypal Website Payments Pro Solution), once payment has been verified, your clients will gain immediate access to an image download link (JPEG files). JPEG files can be up to 8x10 at 300dpi. If your client requires a different file format or a larger image you can fulfill their request by uploading it via FTP or with the Image Archive’s own web based batch uploader to your client’s private order folder. Both you and your clients can manage the entire process from any location using just a browser.

Uploading your images

You can batch upload 100s of images at a time using an FTP client program or with the Image Archive’s web based file uploader. The Image Archive will create any necessary image sizes and thumbnails, but you also have the option to resize them after they have been uploaded. The Image Archive currently supports up to 2MB JPEGs (8x10 @ 300dpi) for standard digital delivery orders. When a client places an order for a large file the Image Archive allows you to add the larger version to their order folder.

Uploaded images can be displayed in password protected folders, private folders and/or interactive folders. The Image Archive can be set to extract IPTC information from your images when they are uploaded. The Image Archive also allows you to batch process tasks such as pricing, captioning, and keywording of images. These batch processes allow you to quickly place the metadata needed for search engines to properly index your website and for your visitors to quickly find them either by searching, folder browsing or by category selections.

How about other payment processing types, shipping and taxes?

The Image Archive currently supports 3 payment methods. The offline payment processing method allows users that have a credit card terminal to collect all payment details online and then process orders offline using their existing terminal. The PayPal standard payment method integrates with PayPal’s Website Payments Standard. This method puts the cart selections in a PayPal secure page to process the payment from there. The disadvantage of the last two methods is that the Image Archive requires your involvement to know if the payment went through, and therefore, until you do so the system is not able to send download links to any digital delivery items the visitor may have purchased. The third option is integration with PayPal’s Website Payments Pro. The advantage of this system is that the Image Archive does not have to send the user to a PayPal screen to complete the payment transaction and it is able to receive payment confirmation in seconds. Your site visitor benefits from the fact that without your intervention the system can automatically display download links for digital delivery images that have been paid. Contact PayPal to inquire about their fee structure and to see what account level is best for you. There are no fees associated with the offline payment processing method.