Toronto/Düsseldorf, July 27, 2010. Masterfile Corporation, one of the world’s leading independent stock photo agencies, has added a royalty-free subscription service to its product line. Subscription plans allow clients to download a fixed number of royalty-free images in a set resolution for a flat fee. Masterfile now offers 4 different subscription plans: low, medium, super-hi resolution plans, and one which allows for mixed resolutions in a convenient and flexible “combo” pack. All subscriptions are available on monthly or yearly terms.

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

Veer now has more than 1.5 million creative photos and illustrations covering a broad range of subject categories, over 12,000 different contemporary and classic fonts and a selection of clever creative merchandise. Veer’s creative elements are priced so affordably that nearly anyone can add style to business, marketing and personal design projects ranging from websites and blog posts to business presentations and ad campaigns.

Simplified Veer.com Provides an Uncomplicated Shopping Experience

Veer.com now features a prominent search box on the homepage and a powerful search engine to make it fast and simple for people to find relevant images and fonts to meet nearly any budget.

Veer® images are available in six standard sizes ranging from extra small to extra, extra large. Image search results can quickly be sorted by price and file size, as well as other more advanced options if needed, to help people find the right image for their project at the best possible price. Once people find an image they like, they can easily buy (download a clean version), try (download a “watermarked” file to see how it looks) or save (put in an album to refer back to later).

Veer offers affordable single fonts starting at just $10. Veer has classic fonts, new releases from small foundries and independent designers, plus Veer Exclusives not available anywhere else.

Flexible Payment Options and Worry-Free Licenses

Customers can now conveniently purchase all images, fonts and merchandise either one at time with a credit card or with Veer Credits. Veer Credits are a prepaid option for shopping at Veer that provide savings of up to 56% over individual credit card purchases.  Veer Credit packs come in nine different sizes, varying from 12 to 2,000 credits, with increasing savings for customers who buy bigger packs. Veer.com has examples of what can be purchased with different amounts of credits.

All images come with, at minimum, a Basic license, which provides an individual with unlimited web use up to 600 by 800 pixels as well as print reproduction rights up to 500,000 units.  Customers can easily extend the license for multiple users, unlimited reproduction or product resale with a few clicks.

Veer is one of the safest places to buy images online. All Veer images are intensively reviewed by Veer’s experienced Content Editors for visual and technical quality as well as model and real property releases.  Every image is protected by the Veer Customer Protection Plan, which provides customers free protection up to $10,000 in legal costs or damages if a claim is ever filed against an image.

Veer Creative Community

Veer also hosts the Veer Ideas community, a place for creative people to play, interact and share ideas with peers.  Creative people can build personal profiles, share their work, connect with friends, join groups, and browse other portfolios to discover new artists. People can read the latest design news on The Skinny blog and post on the community blog, The Fat. Veer Ideas also has a wide selection of free Wallpaper downloads for personal use.

“We have built on Veer’s heritage in stock images and design to completely re-imagine how creative people of all kinds buy affordable and reliable images and fonts,” said Nairn Nerland, General Manager of Veer.com. “We created an uncomplicated shopping experience that lets people stay focused on what matters most: their creative work.”

People can make purchases on Veer.com in U.S. dollars, Canadian dollars, British pounds and Euros, and the website is available in English and German.

Contributors interested in submitting imagery to Veer can earn between $0.35 to $103.25 (USD) for every image sold, depending on image size and extended licenses. To learn more and become a contributor, visit the Veer submissions page.

Veer on Twitter (for customers): @VeerUpdate
Veer on Twitter (for contributors): @VeerContributor

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

Collections are sourced from the industry’s leading providers including Getty Images, iStockphoto and Jupiter Images. Customers can download their images anytime within a year with prices starting at as little as $59 a pack. Image packs are ideal for customers with smaller budgets or those whose needs are project-specific, and they include the same complementary legal protection as Thinkstock’s monthly and annual subscriptions.

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

The Fogstock and Vico Images is an inspiring and provocative royalty free image collection. They provide new content across a wide range of subjects, styles, genres and the collections commitment to quality stock images fits perfectly with the ethos of Reflex Stock.

Dwyer O’Neill CEO of Reflex Stock says “In 2010 we have continued our search for new stylish content because we see that there is still a very healthy appetite for quality stock photography. Our goal is to continue to provide greatstock photos for our clients. Fogstock & Vico Images is high in quality and style covering many popular stock photography themes and we believe that it will be a successful addition to our royalty free library.”

“Reflex Stock moves fast, has global reach and perfectly complements our content strategies,” says FogStock and Vico Images creative director Erik Palmer. “We make art that sells, and Reflex opens up new horizons for our premium RF collections.”

Fog stock & Vico Images are already available and you can preview this collection of stock images onhttp://www.reflexstock.com.

About Reflex Stock: Reflex Stock is one of the world’s leading independent suppliers of premium royalty free and rights managed stock photography. It provides its customers with access to a unique collection of over twelve million quality images in many countries.

Reflex Stock represents a unique selection of the world’s leading image collections and is continually adding new images to its site. The company recently launched a subscription collection of premium stock images.

As well as consulting on all aspects of image rights and licensing, Reflex Stock offers customers an experienced and professional picture researching service that is able to deliver images tailored to your brief and your budget.

Reflex Stock has offices in the UK, Ireland, the United States (New York City) and Brazil.

For further information visit the award winning website www.reflexstock.com

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

Toronto, CA, July 3, 2010. On July 1, 2010, the assets of Crestock, a Norwegian microstock agency (www.crestock.com), were acquired by Masterfile Corporation, a premium stock photo agency based in Toronto, Canada (www.masterfile.com).

Masterfile is a privately-owned company founded in 1981 and is globally recognized in the advertising, publishing and stock photography community as a leading rights-managed and royalty-free licensor. Crestock was founded in 2005 in Bodø, Norway, and is well-known in the microstock community with over 100,000 members and close to 1 million images.

Crestock founder, Geir Are Jensen, says: “Building Crestock was a great adventure. Like many young companies, we had reached the point where we needed additional investment. The scale and resources provided by an established player like Masterfile will enable Crestock to continue growing against powerful global competitors.”

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

Seattle, WA, June 7, 2010. WHAT: Thinkstock, an image subscription product that offers value-conscious professionals a new industry-standard in quality, simplicity, and value with world-class legal protection, today announced a new social media-based art buying service, the @Thinkstock Social Art Buyer.

Recognizing that today’s customers are working against accelerated deadlines to bring their creative projects to market, Thinkstock is leveraging social media to provide near real-time support.

When a creative professional, photo editor, designer or other image user tweets a request to @Thinkstock, the Social Art Buyer – a team of image research experts – will respond with customized image research results directly to the user, no matter what the project.

The Social Art Buyer will also be accessible through the toolbar carried by any link shared via THNKS.TK, @Thinkstock’s custom URL shortener. Now, when users are inspired by the creative links shared by @Thinkstock on Twitter, the toolbar will allow users to make an image request to the Social Art Buyer without leaving the site of their inspiration.

WHY: Thinkstock exists to support and inspire creativity by developing new tools and services that challenge people’s existing perceptions of how to use stock imagery. @Thinkstock has become a catalyst for sharing inventive ideas and inspiring editorial content, providing a more meaningful experience for creative professionals. An of-the-community presence in social media enables Thinkstock to communicate with, and learn from, image users from a variety of creative backgrounds. The company expands on the @Thinkstock engagement via Facebook at http://facebook.com/thinkstock.

WHERE: Through the @Thinkstock Twitter account, Facebook profile or THNKS.TK URL toolbar.

WHO: Thinkstock is committed to changing the way that creative professionals think about a stock image services by combining useful services, like @Thinkstock and the Social Art Buyer, with the most complete image offering available in today’s marketplace.

For more information, please visit THNKS.TK/SocialArtBuyer or follow @Thinkstock on Twitter.

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

Offering more than 11 million images and 180,000 footage clips, with search supported in 10 languages, Shutterstock helps busy professionals quickly find the right royalty-free content for any project.

Shutterstock’s recent search enhancements include:

- Saved Search and Search Alerts, features that empower image buyers to
track topics of interest easily and automatically. Customers can
receive free e-mail notifications when new images match a saved search.
- People Search, which identifies images based on the number of people in
a photograph, as well as their gender, age, and ethnicity.
- An improved Similar Images Search, which recommends other images based
on qualities such as keywords, image colors and models.
- A Real-Time Search engine, which indexes new images within seconds,
rather than hours. Image and footage buyers will see fresh content
faster, including up-to-the-minute editorial images.

Additionally, Shutterstock continues to refine its proprietary “Most Popular” results algorithm, which weighs keyword relevance, image download frequency, and other customer behavior. The search engine produces more accurate results than competing stock sites, and is especially precise with searches involving multiple words.

Search improvements benefit artists as well. Shutterstock crowdsources the talents of photographers, illustrators and videographers around the world who earn money when customers download their content. Real-Time Search means approved images and footage will appear on Shutterstock faster, and a “Newest First” search results page will always display fresher and more varied content

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

At launch the Stockfresh collection features over 100,000 images for sale from top stock photographers and studios such as Yuri Arcurs, Ron Chapple’s Iofoto, Monkey Business Images, Dmitriy Shironosov and many more. They can be purchased through a wide range of pay per download and subscription plans available at highly competitive prices, and with Stockfresh’s exceptionally high artist commissions customers can always be sure that their money goes to the right place. In addition to this, the website’s easy to use, intuitive and uncluttered interface helps customers save time on their projects.

Stockfresh was founded by Peter Hamza and Andras Pfaff who have been in the stock photo industry for nearly 10 years and were also behind the highly successful free stock photo community stock.xchng and its microstock sister site Stockxpert. After working together with some of the biggest agencies they decided to become independent again and sold their shares in those sites to create something new and exciting from scratch along the values they believe in – in Peter Hamza’s words “simplicity, quality, fair pricing and last but not least fair commissions”. For more information visit http://stockfresh.com.

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

Stockphotorights.com was created to educate image buyers regarding the legalities of image usage and to provide information and advice on how to license images with confidence. The site, which launched today, was created in response to a survey of image users that showed many gaps in legal understanding of picture licensing. Stockphotorights.com was built by Getty Images and has the support of leading industry associations PACA (Picture Archive Council of America) and BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies).

“Shutterstock’s collaboration with Stockphotorights.com reflects our commitment to ensuring fair and legal image use,” said Jon Oringer, founder and CEO of Shutterstock.

Shutterstock provides its customers with legal security and peace of mind by backing every file in its vast library with a $10,000 guarantee. Shutterstock will provide up to $10,000 to cover legal costs and direct damages for claims arising from the use of an image or footage clip licensed through Shutterstock. The guarantee covers key areas of liability, including copyrights, trademarks and rights of privacy and publicity.

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)

Calgary, May 5, 2010. Veer (www.veer.com), a producer and provider of affordable visual elements and design-related products today announced the Veer® Dash for Cash where image contributors have a chance to earn their share of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Veer plans to give away to new and existing contributors during the promotion.

The Veer Dash for Cash gives new and existing Veer contributors from most countries worldwide the chance to earn up to $1.40 per approved image submitted between May 5 and June 30, 2010.

© 2010, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)