Terms

• Images must be your copyright and have a model release where applicable.
• We expect images to be provided as a digital image file to our specification, fully captioned. See file specifications below.

Royalties: We split sales 50/50 (industry standard). Sales are notified quarterly and royalty checks sent out by post in £ Sterling or US$ (at exchange rate on day of issue).

Exclusivity: we do not require exclusive agreements like many other agencies do. We are photographers too and feel this is unfair!

Licensing: We reserve the right to license material to other agencies from time to time (still at 50/50 after the other agencies cut) and to use material for self promotion.

Security: Hi-rez copies are stored on our servers in secure physical locations and protected by 128 bit encrypted password protection with backup copies and redundant systems. Low-rez copies are protected by page level scripting. However, we cannot accept responsibility for copyright abuse, however caused.

Image Specifications

We have some strict technical requirements for images that are chosen to be integrated into the library in order to maintain consistency. These requirements are easily achievable provided you read the following advice. 

We accept images...

• shot on 12+ megapixel cameras
• 35mm scans of MINIMUM 2000 x 3000 pixels - most slide scanners (but not flatbed scanners) are of sufficient quality
• No B&W – we have colour images only. Clients can convert to B&W if they want to later

We only accept digital submissions by upload or on CD/DVD.

We accept most image file formats providing they have the correct file extension (required by Windows platforms). We do not accept images compressed using the LZW algorithm We deliver images as JPEG and recommend this format when sending us images - you can get more of them on your CD/DVD! Use the minimum compression (best quality) option when saving.

The filename should be

• Short (10 characters max)
• unique across your collection (your images are stored in one directory so cannot be used if same name as another file!)
• grouped ideally, name the files alphabetically by category and number them e.g. animal1, animal2 This makes it easier for us to add to our categories when we see them sorted in a list.

Keywords 6 words not already in the caption

The CD/DVD should be labeled. Include your name, address, and return mailer (if you require the CD back).

Images will be individually assessed. Most rejected images either lack or have too much/little density or have hairs/artifacts. We rarely use all submitted images. Limit the number of shots on any particular subject.

Captions and Keywords

You can help us add your material quickly if you provide accurate captioning. This is time consuming but, being the primary way buyers find your images, a little work pays dividends later. 

First and explanation of how we need it done. You see, captions and keywords are related, but distinctly different, beasts! Both are textual but captions are more descriptive.

Captions describe in words what you can see.

Keywords are related terms outside the obvious visual context. For example an image captioned ‘woman dancing’ may have the keywords ‘female artistic movement art pose leotard’.

IPTC

Both caption and keyword text should be stored inside the image in the IPTC fields. IPTC is the industry standard method for attaching text to images for digital transmission and identification. This can be done using Photoshop. See under the File menu for File Info and enter subject details under Caption and keywords under Keywords

Captions

A caption is the text that appears below images on our lbrary pages and is vital for search engines to index your images.

Captions should be…

• maximum 255 characters long (but ideally shorter, too much is as bad as too little)
• Alphanumeric (letters or numbers – no special characters like linefeed)
• Place taken i.e. country AND county/state/region (if geographically relevant)

Keywords

You should also keyword your images in the IPTC keyword field

6 keywords maximum please

We have a very sophisticated system that can generate keywords from captions. You therefore do not need to duplicate words that are already in the image caption field.

Also...

We can also generate keywords from categories, so group related images by directory folder to save typing the same words again and again!

Directory folders are especially recommended for places. For example you may have a folder for a country and sub folders for cities belonging to that country. Much of our library is indexed this way.

Keywords may be abstracts, concepts, and any other words you think someone might type in to find your image.

Natural history subjects should be identified by their Latin Name wherever possible.

We require..

Currently we are looking for...