Field Report:

The Non-Glamorous Side of Photography

Top Photo News Stories

Dan Heller Goes Through Revolving Door at Picscout – PDNPulse. The real moral of this story is that if you have a job that you value, learn to keep your mouth shut. More on this at the Picscout Blog.

getMETAsmart! Event Tour – PhotoMetaData.org. A traveling photography business seminar that serves to educate photographers about organizing their images and keeping track of them online with meta data. I went to the Los Angeles event and would recommend it to anyone that is not already an experienced stock photographer or knowledgeable about current marketing strategies.

6 Comments »

  1. Hey Richard! Thanks for the links. Huffington Post blog has a long discussion on the topic of the ban lift, and there appear to be many points-of-view on the topic. It’s a good discussion with a lot of widely varying ideas.

    You’ve provided a lot of great links here. Now that I have more time, I am once again enjoying the blogs (you know I love politics), and I love your new one. Good luck with it and congrats! Looks great. I will make a link on my page.

    Comment by Gloria Hopkins | July 18, 2008 | Reply

  2. Thanks for the kind words Gloria. The orphan works bill has been the hot topic in photography for quite a few months now. Crazy.

    Comment by Richard Wong | July 18, 2008 | Reply

  3. Richard, Cuil is definitely not cool. I dug around a bit and found up to now about 30 photos they have been scraping from my sites. In my view, this is not “fair use” as they are just illustrating certain topics with my images, usually next to other, competing sites. Can it get any worse? Then again, I am currently checking with an IP lawyer whether photographers can extract some money from them. They must still have some money left over from the $33M VC investment, right? *chuckle*

    Comment by Mark Zanzig | July 31, 2008 | Reply

  4. Wow. Well one thing for sure is that they are doing a good job of indexing our sites for images apparently! Yes I agree, no issue with Google since they link to the appropriate websites, but Cuil doesn’t for the most part.

    Let me know about the lawyer when you hear back. :-)

    Comment by Richard Wong | July 31, 2008 | Reply

  5. Not only is Cuil scraping photos from our sites, it often uses misleading images next search results…for instance, my name. When I did a search for myself to see how my various sites rank, it listed my primary portfolio site as result #1, but next to it was a sexually suggestive image of a woman – ‘Hey Cuil, I’m a LANDSCAPE photographer!” As well, I performed searches for other photographers’ names in my circle and the results were repeated almost every time. One amazing landscape photographer that I know had an image of a woman holding her breasts next to his site info – completely unacceptable. The Cuil interface is nice and clean, but the results are often useless and this misleading tactic of theirs with associating incorrect images with search results is effectively trashing our names.

    **Update – I just performed the above-mentioned searches again before submitting my comment here and it appears Cuil either acted upon an e-mail complaint I sent them or upon the boundless similar e-mails they likely received from others. The questionably suggestive images have been removed, but I’m still keeping tabs on these jokers and wanted to share the entirely of my experience with them thus far…regardless of whether or not they’ve changed policies since their launch.

    Comment by Cody Redmon | July 31, 2008 | Reply

  6. Thanks for the input Cody. I can see why you’d be upset especially when there are negative associations with that image.

    Comment by Richard Wong | July 31, 2008 | Reply


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