How To Download Images From Dreamstime?
Foap is a stock-photo platform app that allows artists to license photographs taken with their phone, compact and DSLR cameras for a set price of $10 each. With the exception of a few that enters Mission competitions, these photos aren’t edited, or reviewed for errors and thus displayed for sales as were taken with camera errors, such as noise, distortion, artifacts and chromatic aberration.
Foap’s main thrust is to provide on demand promotional images and videos for companies or businesses that make requests. Photographers (also called creators) are thus encouraged to join missions that carry the brief of required photos or videos. Other missions include premium whereby Creators pay coins to enter. Photographers either buy these coins, or earn them by listening to advertisements. Foap also runs their own non-premium brand missions and has recently introduced Country Challenge (A mission whereby photographers of each county where there are multiple active photographers compete for the top country prize and the winners compete for the international prize).
In general, the review method adopted by Foap involves members rating other’s photographs. The rated photos gradually move up the search engine based on the total rating among other factors. Most persons rating photographs are not professionals or even have an understanding of stock-photography or knowledge of what to look for in a quality check. In many cases photographers give others high rating with the hope of receiving high rating themselves – not on the basis of photograph being of good quality, acceptable, or liked. Others give lower rating with the hope of retarding the upward movement of better quality images. Other factors that help photos to move up the search engine include addition to albums and sales. Foap might eventually remove extremely poor quality photos (see Terms Of Use), but even then, there are many that display focus or sharpness issues, noise and artifacts.
Humans review the photographs for missions and those meeting the required criteria selected and possibly entered in their relevant missions. Answer to the question “Why is the photo I upload not visible in the mission?” summarizes the criteria. Unlike most other stock-photo platforms, photographers receive no notification of rejections or acceptance, and hence for the most parts their status in the competition is unknown. Creators passing through reviews for premium missions do not necessarily get entry in the relevant competitions. After that, review images are selected for the competition, which enters a level of a voting process that ranks images. The process of selections goes through several levels considering compliance to specific criteria that finally leads to the winning image or images as explained at Premium Mission evaluation criteria. The blog, How are winners chosen gives additional explanation about how winners are selected. Those creators with winning photos, they receive much higher payment than the basic $5.00 per licensed image.
Even if you do not get selected for mission it is important that you persevere in finding ways to improve your skills, keep uploading, rate other photographer’s photos, comment and upload to missions. As you progress and your photos reach the required standard you’ll be selected for the Foap Plus Program by the curation team and as such “you have access to special missions directly from the best brands”. While this is a big plus for some Foap Plus creators, those outside of the countries that these brands operate are most likely at a disadvantage since they wouldn't have access to free products.
Most people uploading to this platform use smart phones for their photography. Smart phones have small sensors, and fixed wide f-stop. As a result many landscape shots found on the platform are without details and depth of field. The poor quality produced is more visible when zoomed in to full size. Other photos of subjects that are closer, because of size and depth may be of better overall quality, but exhibits large out of focus areas, or lack of sharp edges, artifacts and chromatic aberration. There are others, however, that looks fine. Many of these smart phone produced photos might be useful for instances where full size, cropping or printing are not required. However, for more flexible use designers will be inclined to choose photos taken with either compact or DSLR cameras. In many cases, on the Foap Market, photos taken with compact cameras or DSLR that are clean and without flaws get buried under the overwhelming number of phone camera photos.
With the numerous platforms competing with high quality, clean images design artists who would normally buy from Foap Market are gravitating towards these. On those platforms they do not have to wade through large numbers of poor quality photos to probably find a suitable image for their project. Also these photographs taken with larger cameras having larger sensors carry more depth of field flexibility, producing sharper easy to crop edges allows artist to place selected subjects on their favorite backgrounds or even billboards. Now even Social Medias are requesting high quality images.
Foap Visibility
Foap Crowd Market was once on the Google Search top page when you search for “stockphotos”, or “stock photos”. Since more than a year ago Foap Crowd Market photos are nowhere to be found using those search words/phrase. Even if you use the phrase “royalty free images” you will not see a link leading to a single Foap image. To find Foap Market Images you have to know that Foap exist and specifically search for “Foap Royalty Free Image”.
Foap introduction of Album creation came into effect with a promise to feature high quality albums on Google. For a while various Albums, including a few I created, were visible on Google’s top page. Possibly because of the mass production of poor quality images and the inability of most photographer to assess what are good quality images, that did not last for long before thy too disappeared from Google’s pages as Foap redirected their attention to Mission promotions. Therefore Foap Market images are left by change if someone who knows of Foap do decides to go on the platform to search – most likely Foap customers, or if discovered on social media, but discovering Foap is not as easy as it is for other popular platforms, hence some of the reasons for most photographers getting little or no sales, and the large number of frustrated creators that eventually leave. To sift out, and to give experienced photographers a fair chance of earning, Foap has taken the brand mission a step further. Now photographers producing high quality images with good composition are selected for Foap Plus once they meet the qualification at How To Join Foap Plus Program.
This program gives selected photographers more exposure to big brands and chances of increased sales. Creators within countries that these brands operate receive free products for photography under agreed terms which may include giving free photos in return. If you note “Sold” on the app’s “Explore” page, most sales are by photographers that are members of the Foap Plus program. I am not sure of the details of how this works, but as I do learn more I will update. In any case the idea is to use a camera that can give you beautiful photos, learn how to use it properly and produce clean good quality images, build a portfolio, keep uploading to missions so that you can get noticed by the curators and be selected for Foap Plus.
No comments:
Post a Comment