Guest Post by David Peralty
Deb’s note: I asked my friend and brand new community manager for PicApp to offer a guest post letting you know more about this great free, legal resource for images. I’ve been using PicApp for several months, and while there are still bugs to work out, I also see improvements being made and a way for me to use news and celebrity images legally. The image you see here is from PicApp.
Most of the blog networks that I have ever been involved with don’t spend the money to have access to images. Either they haven’t considered this, or they assumed we could find the images we need from the variety of free sources out there in the market.
Unfortunately, these free sources aren’t always filled with the images we need or want, and as such many bloggers jump over to Google’s Image Search and use copyright images without permission. This is illegal, but for the most part, it has been considered harmless. The harmless factor goes out the window when you are using images for a network blog. Networks are businesses and as such they have to be treated in a certain way. They can’t violate copyright laws or they will eventually have to deal with legal issues that could cost money, and eventually ruin a network.
Some blog networks have already started creating content guidelines to protect themselves, while still not offering money to get the high quality images they require for their content.
PicScout, the parent company of PicApp saw this issue, and while tracking how much copyright violation there is with their Image Tracker service, they realized that there was a void in the marketplace. Bloggers wanted high quality images, but they didn’t have the financial resources to back it up. PicApp contacted Getty, Corbis and other high quality image providers to come up with a solution.
The solution is PicApp, and its service. PicApp provides Getty and Corbis images through a flash embed system. This protects Getty and Corbis from having their images stolen, and through an ad interface on the embedded image, Getty, Corbis and other image providers will make some money back on the use of their images.
This provides bloggers with high quality images from the top stock photography sources in a way that continues to keep the providers happy.
PicApp has now gone beyond just providing those images though, and has added features that make it even easier for bloggers to get what they need. PicApp has added RSS for search, allowing you to subscribe to your searches so that you are notified of new images being added to PicApp.
This is great for those tracking events, or constantly talking about the same subject, so that you don’t have to come back and search on PicApp; instead, we will send the updates right to you.
We have also arranged to have constant updates from our image providers, meaning that bloggers can find images of sporting events before they have even concluded. This gives a competitive edge to the bloggers using PicApp. They will have images of celebrities, amazing sporting events, or even political events before they finish allowing their posts to be even more relevant and interesting.
It has been proven time and time again that adding relevant images to a post attracts more attention than posts without any images.
PicApp is still in beta and as such we are still looking for feedback, so if you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please let me know either here on this post, or at david.peralty@picscout.com
I truly appreciate this information, I’ve used Picapp a little in the past, for my network blogs. I didn’t fully understand it’s potential, and uses for my own personal blogs. Now I’m sure it’s a resource I’ll use more often.
Never heard of it, but thumbs up from me to you!