fotoLibra was an open access
picture library / stock agency. It was founded in 2002, produced a beta site in March 2004 and launched commercially in January 2005.
It sold
rights-managed and
royalty-free
Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales.
Computer standard ...
images, with an approximate 80/20 split in favor of rights-managed. fotoLibra claimed to be the first open access fully digital stock agency. In July 2014 it had over 12,000 member photographers and 5,000 registered buyers in 170 countries. The service ceased in June 2020.
Concept
The idea of fotoLibra came about when founder
Gwyn Headley
Gwyn Headley (born 1946 in Harlech) is a British historian and writer.
Education and early life
As a child Headley lived in Accra, Gold Coast (now Ghana); Krumpendorf, Austria; Berlin, Germany; Warsaw, Poland; Westmalle, Belgium and Paris, France ...
lost 120 years of his family’s photographs in a flood. With a background in book publishing, he felt that publishers would have a need for previously unpublished photographs and for images that could not be taken again. The original intention of the business was to provide a repository of family archives, but the ability to aggregate images uploaded from multiple sources and to make them available for download and purchase anywhere in the world caught the attention of contemporary photographers, and the company now operates largely as a general commercial digital picture library.
Features
fotoLibra provides the facilities of a digital stock agency. In addition, buyers can filter searches with a variety of parameters, including
hexadecimal
In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, hexa ...
color searches. Members receive a minimum of 50% of the net sales receipts from picture sales and all sales income received is paid into an
escrow
An escrow is a contractual arrangement in which a third party (the stakeholder or escrow agent) receives and disburses money or property for the primary transacting parties, with the disbursement dependent on conditions agreed to by the transacti ...
account to protect their interest. All pictures are vetted to ensure inappropriate content is not uploaded.
Closure
VisConPro Ltd, trading as fotoLibra, closed for business on Monday 1 June 2020.
References
[{{cite news , title=New Approach Brings Down Picture Buying Costs , url=http://www.creativematch.com/news/new-approach-brings-down-picture/91181/ , newspaper=creativematch , date=16 June 2005 , access-date=21 March 2012]
External links
fotoLibra website
Stock photography