Picfair: fighting back against theft of photos

Steve Keenan

July 29, 2013

By Steve Keenan

I’ve known Benji Lanyado for a few years, from his time on the travel desk at The Guardian. A very good writer, he was also firmly in the vanguard of print journalists who took social media to heart.

He pioneered ‘Twi-Trips,’ whereby Benji landed in a city and asked Twitter users to determine how he would spend his day (his first was to Paris in February, 2009) He also created a timeline map - Kerouapp - to help illustrate these articles online, and later turned his hand to coding and created RedditEdit - an aggregating site that aggregated an aggregator. Neat.

So when he invited people to join a mailing list for his latest project, PicFair, I signed up knowing he wouldn’t be wasting his time. And he hasn’t. He started writing the code in February and has now launched the site, and all for under £4,000. He write about the process on his own blog.

Basically, it is the first site that allows anybody to post their own photos and to set their own price to use. That’s really it. It’s simple, democratic and PicFair earns its cut by charging the buyer 10% commission (July 30: My colleague Mark Frary rightly points out that there are sites that pay for images so ‘first’ isn’t strictly accurate. I do think PicFair is a different breed, however).

It’s been going for under a week - so clearly it may take a few days more for my initial canon of work to sell. But it is attracting attention - writer Matthew Teller has already posted his own stringent analysis - is Picfair fair?.

Travel writers and bloggers are giving it a go as it’s appeal is obvious. Travel writer Donald Strachan has already earned a fiver for this image, snapped on his way to work.

So I asked Benji some questions. Here are his Q&A responses:

What inspired the idea to stop photographers getting ripped off?

AirBnB, in a big way. I’ve been thinking about Picfair for years - but seeing AirBnB do so well convinced me to get on and make it. I’m trying to do exactly what they did - seeing an old industry with a huge, greedy middleman tier between a buyer and a seller, and trying to replace it with technology, so everyone gets a better deal.

Is photo theft one of the biggest downsides of internet journalism?

Ha, no. Shitty business models and legacy organisations moving too slowly are the biggest downsides of internet journalism. But yes, photo theft is a pain in the arse. But it’ll change. People, myself included, used to not even think about downloading music or films for free, but now they think twice about it, knowing that they’re screwing someone, somewhere. The same will happen for images. It has to. Picfair wants to be part of codifying some kind of Better Behaviour Around Online Images (BBAOI) movement, but they’ll have to come up with a catchier name than that.

Do you expect professionals to join up - or is it likely to be one for amateur snappers?

Both. Although I expect it will be more the latter than the former, simply because there are more amateurs than there are professionals. Another thing that inspired me to make Picfair was the rising quality of the amateur ranks. Professionals might not like it, but amateurs can take superb pictures too. Last year 9 million images were added to the global stock image market, while over the same period of time 142 billion images were added to Facebook and Instagram alone. If 0.01% of these are fit for market, that’s 14 million images.

Who are the purchasers most likely to be?

Digitally native publications. People who use Shutterstock and iStockPhoto but think it’s too bland and restrictive. I also think there’s a chance that individual sales could form part of the demand. I built Picfair myself, and the overheads are very low, so I don’t have investors breathing down my neck forcing me to focus on one sector or sale type, I’m happy to see how it progresses, naturally.

Any projected scale in terms of numbers of photos loaded and sales?

One billion sales (raises pinky to mouth). Not really. The most important thing in these first few weeks is that the people uploading to the site are happy with it.

What extra features to come?

3D gamified augmented reality interactive responsive parallax. And Scratch n Sniff.

Will you use editorial judgement to take down frankly appallingly rubbish images?

Nope. Picfair sorts images according to our trending algorithm and image views, so the “wheat” naturally rises to the top of global arrays and search pages. I prefer the idea of algorithmic curation to editorial curation. The crowd can be better editors than editors.

And presume you’ll need to monitor for dodgy stuff?

Everything is post-moderated on Picfair, either by myself or my intern, or by Shared Workforce, an automated moderation service. Testing this was fun. Its willy response time is roughly 10 minutes.

When does the video version of PicFair launch?

Not for a long time. Lots of assumptions to test before I even consider adding video.

Anything I haven’t covered and you’d like to say?

Nope, all good, cheers Steve.

And thank you, Benji. I hope it works brilliantly.