In Instagram's early days, it partnered with professional photographers to highlight their work, such as this black and white image from Richard Koci Hernandez, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. Photo: Richard Koci Hernandez / SF
In Instagram's early days, it partnered with professional photographers to highlight their work, such as this black and white image from Richard Koci Hernandez, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. Once, not long ago, Instagram courted professional photographers. Then a few days ago, it kicked them in the teeth - or so the reaction to the photo-sharing site's new terms of service suggests.
On Instagram, professional photographers were not pleased, posting comments like "Dear Instagram, you know I love you but this may just be a dealbreaker," "Looks like@instagram is jumping on the copyright infringement boat," and a simple "I'm out."
By the end of the day Tuesday, the company had gone into damage-control mode. Co-founder Kevin Systrom said the company had "heard loud and clear that many users are confused and upset about what the changes mean" and promised to modify the new rules that appeared to grant Instagram the right to use and sell photos without notifying or compensating the photographer.
Despite the backpedaling, it's not clear whether the pros can be wooed back.
Perhaps more than any of Instagram's other users, professional photographers are feeling particularly spurned. In its early days, when Instagram was turning itself from a Foursquare also-ran into a photo-sharing site, it relied on partnerships with professional photographers to promote its service.
Showcasing photos
Great photographers were featured, giving Instagram cachet and credibility. The New Yorker set up an Instagram feed, then turned it over to a different photographer each week to showcase their work and daily life. National Geographic shared the names and accounts of its photographers for all to follow.
It also provided a community for photographers to see each other's work and comment directly - a rare thing in the photo world. Photo editors and photo buyers got a view into photographers' processes and lives. For photographers, it's easier to communicate with images than it is with text, and it's more interesting and rewarding to do so with a community of other photographers and photo lovers than everyone you went to high school with. Lots of people loved Instagram, but as a service, it really did feel tailored for the pros.
The world of professional photo rights is complex, but here is a quick overview: Photo buyers from ad agencies, publishers, newspapers and magazines pay for use and rights. The amount depends on visibility, circulation, size of use and a variety of other qualifiers.
A magazine like Rolling Stone will pay less to use an image than, for example, Bank of America probably would. In most cases, the photographer retains the permanent rights to images unless a fairly high fee is paid or the photographer is working on contract.
Policy shift goal?
Some have suggested that Facebook is trying to turn Instagram into a stock photography site, a la iStock, or other services that sell images to users. More likely, it's looking for cover, in case it decides to use images from the site in its own advertising and promotions, or in conjunction with other companies - an issue Systrom alluded to in his statement.
This same issue comes up every time Facebook changes its user privacy settings. People threaten to leave and don't, and Facebook doesn't sell our vacation photos. (At least, it hasn't yet.)
Here's the difference: There isn't a good alternative to Facebook right now. But there is a good alternative to Instagram: It's called Flickr.
Even before the Instagram announcement, Yahoo's Flickr service was starting to show signs of life for the first time in years, with an elegant new app and a renewed commitment to its users. It's worth remembering where Flickr went wrong in the first place: It thought it was a database of photos, not a community of photographers. That was a mistake - its users knew it, and defected en masse.
Now, anecdotally, they would appear to be coming back. Flickr has a fairly elegant solution for this: It allows photographers to upload their photos under the Creative Commons license or, on the other end of the spectrum, not to be reproduced in any way (these images can't even be dragged and dropped).
That seemed fair to me, so I decided to give Flickr another try. It took me only a dozen tries to remember my password.
Source: http://www.sfgate.com
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