Evan: The idea for Digital Railroad is nine years old. I worked for a photo agency called SABA Press about fifteen years ago after realizing that I didn’t want to be a full time working professional photographer. I subsequently became a photo buyer for several magazines and then worked with Rick Smolan on The 24 Hours In Cyber Space project. That was followed by about 9 years developing digital imaging platforms for consumers at @Home Network, Eyetide Media and Virgilio which was the #1 internet portal in Italy owned by Telecom Italia. In 1997 we created the first broadband photography portal as a multi-million dollar joint venture with @Home Network and Intel. Our goal was to create the first broadband online photo community, well before all the early online consumer communities started raising venture capital.

Nine years ago I realized that there was a problem in the professional photography industry, and many of my photographer friends agreed it was not getting easier to market and distribute images. There were too many repetitive activities with digital workflow, including the process of managing, marketing, selling, searching, and downloading images. All of the non-creative processes needed to be automated. To solve these problems for photographers, editors and buyers we build Digital Railroad to minimize production and enable buyers and sellers to more easily find images. In the past the major companies have had a lot of R&D money to build their online proprietary systems, which are only used by a small fraction of the professional photographers in the world. We are building the Digital Railroad platform to enable any photographer, agency or any small collection to have the technology power of a major agency.

Digital Railroad is an application services company, that is fully web based. There are now over 700 photographers, 35 agencies, millions of images, and over 21,000 buyers covering 53 countries registered and using the system. The company was incorporated in May of ’03, we launched the first product in August of ’04, and now about a 2 years later, we are seeing a great deal of progress.

Mactribe: What do photographers get with Digital Railroad?

Evan: Each member has their own branded online searchable archive powered by Digital Railroad. Digital Railroad is not the brand. The members are the brand. Equally, a buyer can sign in at any one of the sites, and then have a unique member name and password that spans across every archive. Let’s say a buyer does research on celebrity photographs, for example, and the selected images come from many different archives, there will be one personal workspace that travels everywhere with them for easy access to save images that are linked to the high resolution images which will minimize their production tasks.

No other system has one platform that gives a buyer one personal workspace to manage images from hundreds of different branded archives. The photographer or the agency manages the brand, the high res download and the rights. The buyer has one in box where he/she can manage the low res images and from which they can download licensed high res images for production. The unique aspect is that the photographer/agent always retains their brand. It allows them to manage, market and sell themselves. Photographers can syndicate images to multiple different agencies by our system. We are not an agency; we are a technology company giving photographers the technology and tools most recently only available to the mega agencies. We are their personal business technology providers and partners.

Everyone is able to market their own site and has their own branding. We don’t enable global search yet but very soon you will be able to search across all images permissioned for global search by the members. Of course, we are in constant development of new features and regularly release new features that help our members. In the future there will be more features and products that come out. As of now the user has a storefront in the global market and soon they can place their selected images in a global marketplace. It gives photographers more time to shoot and be with their family, and it offers this at an affordable price.

Mactribe: What is the cost?

Evan: Digital Railroad Members have monthly application service fees depending on how many photographers are members in each archive. For unique photographers it’s $50/ month. Each individual member gets twenty gigs of storage and bandwidth included in the basic membership, but that can be increased to terabytes of storage. Some of our members are already using terabytes of storage for their archives.

Mactribe: So if someone wants to buy an image, how do they do it?

Evan: The buyers find their image in one of the archives via search or by the member marketing their images to buyers. Buyers can request one or many images. If they request an image for editorial or commercial use, they sign in with their one unique Digital Railroad membership, request the size and price, and email is automatically sent to the photographer and/or agent of the images. Now the photographer signs into his/her archive from any computer in the world. They can see all pending image requests. They can communicate with the client in the system and agree on a price to release the high res image. The price depends on the seller. We are a technology platform that enables photographers and agencies to more easily buy, sell and distribute images. Soon that process is going to be e-commerce enabled. Today e-commerce credit card transactions are a small percent [less than 5%] of photography sales worldwide but it is growing. We always focus on developing features for 80% of the market rather than the small percentage of the market.

Evan: Archive photo requests can be automatically sent to anyone you want, your agent or rep. The next step is going into the system and releasing the photo.

The workflow consists of uploading images by FTP or by browser. You upload each image only once and the servers resize everything as needed. You can then publish images just for specific clients, or publicly, so anybody can search the archive. When you have licensed images to buyers, you release the image file for download.

Everybody chooses their own file sizes. Blend Images, for instance, has about twenty sub agencies, and every month they used to send thousands of fifty MB files on hard drives. Now they upload once and the system sends out to twenty destinations in our unique FTP syndication system, and our system automatically sends multiple resolutions of the images out to everyone on their list. Therefore, they don’t have to send hard drives around the world. We have become a core part of their distribution workflow system.

Mactribe: How does one get paid and what about metadata?

Evan: Members manage their invoicing and payments themselves as normal business in the photography industry has been done for decades. Most significant buyers around the world still use purchase orders and request invoices. There is little use of online ecommerce solutions today. But, as I mentioned, this transaction activity is increasing.

We follow the industry standard IPTC templates and extract the metadata from all the major photo editing applications. Whether or not you use PhotoShop, Photo Mechanic, Aperture, or iView that data will get extracted and automatically published in your archive. You can change it at any time after it’s in your archive, and future changes to image metadata will follow that image wherever it is distributed or sold. You can batch caption from anywhere in the world, or you can give someone else assistant privileges to do that. You can add caption or keywords at any time. You can syndicate or send to somebody else within a second that data has changed. The photographers do the keywording or they can outsource it, and members can work with editors or keyworders who can be anywhere in the world. Many of our individual members already outsource this type of work to others so that they can focus on doing what they do best – making great pictures.

You can also organize the sequencing, so you can tell a visual story, with drag and drop availability, and you can change the sizes of the images and save the sequence, or you can print the images in different layouts for record keeping or editing offline. We leverage the power of technology to automate the non creative tasks.

Evan: Yes. Many of our members are successfully increasing their sales. From Mark Garfinkel, an award-winning, thirteen year staff photojournalist for The Boston Herald whose Digital Railroad powered archive has enabled him to boost his earnings percentage by more than 30 percent, to Katharina Hesse, a photographer based in China who recently sold 14 photographs to TIME, Inc. of Mexico for a 10 page feature story in Expansión and their editors found her via Digital Railroad.

Mactribe: How many countries are you in?

Evan: We are in 53 countries, and everything is in English right now. Additional languages are in the plans and many of our members already caption their images in more than one language. You can change the colors and the site design as often as you want. You can also easily feature images on the home page. You can do now in minutes what used to take days. There is more time to shoot or market images rather than doing repetitive non creative tasks.

We also recently announced some great new members such as:

Agencies and Collectives:

• ABACA Press [France]

• BEImages Sports [US]

• Contrasto [Italy]

• Eve Photographers

• Michael Ochs Archives [US]

• Moment Agency [Sweden]

• NBCU Photobank [US]

• Stephen Cohen Gallery [US]

• Vistalux [US]

• Zoomstock [US]

Photographers:

• Daniel J. Cox [US]

• Robert Holmes [UK]

• Jose Goitia [Cuba]

• Nir Kafri [Israel]

• Tim Page [Australia]

• Jim Richardson [US]

• David Sanger [US]

Mactribe: It seems to me that as soon as you started you were already there.

Evan: That’s the way I like to do things. There are people that talk about doing and there are people that talk by their actions. Sometimes new announcements come in advance of release to help members prepare for upcoming features but the key is to always be direct and honest with our members. Even though I am the founder of Digital Railroad, it is impossible to build a successful company alone. We have an incredible team who come from the community with expertise as photographers, editors, agents, digital imaging innovators, software developers and more. We are often told by our members that they are comforted that Digital Railroad is not just a technology company but the community helping the community.

Additionally, we have a board of advisors comprised of technologists, entrepreneurs, and photography industry veterans who are extremely passionate about Digital Railroad’s mission and they help guide us along the way. I started it with my own money and we have since raised 5.2M in venture capital from respected the firms Mogenthaler and Venrock. That enabled us to grow more aggressively and hire a great team, which is the most important thing.

We have a lot of new technology products about to be announced including e-commerce features, a global search marketplace and collaborations with technology partners. We were the first photography company that created RSS photo feeds and we will continue to innovate. We have also increased our collaboration with the PLUS coalition significantly and look forward to many more exciting projects in the future.

Evan: Obviously, technology will continue to be the catalyst for exponential change and evolution in the stock photo industry.

In 1996, I told my professional photography friends that they would almost all be shooting digital very soon. In 1997, we built the first broadband online community as we believed digital image viewing would drastically increase. Many analysts thought no-one would ever share images other than via email, and many others thought no one would want to share photos online instead of sharing prints. In 2003, I wrote an article in the Digital Journalist that camera phones would replace spot photography news. Well, these predictions have been validated.

I am very excited about the future of stock photography as the increase in image consumption worldwide continues to exponentially grow and this is mostly due to the voracious appetite people have with viewing images online, and on digital devices. As the Internet continues to grow from text based to a multimedia experience…more and more images will need to be purchased. Of course, pricing models will continue to evolve as they have for years but the best and most contextually unique image will always generate more revenue. Content is King and will always be King.

As for predicting unique photography related technologies around the corner – you will just have to wait until Digital Railroad rolls out new features in the years to come.