Google Search As A Picture Frame & iSyndica For Image Distribution

Here are two short snippets that may be of interest to photographers, illustrators and designers.

Google Picture Background

Earlier this week Google announced on its blog that you can now upload your favorite photograph (or illustration or any kind of image) as a background to use on your Google Search home page. You can choose a photograph from your computer, from your Picassa web albums if you already have one, or from a public gallery of featured photographs hosted by Picassa, or from the “Editors Picks”. You can upload JPG, GIF or PNG formats.

To change your Google background, go to Google.com and you should see a link in the lower left-hand corner which says “Change background image”. Once you click that, a dialog box opens and you can choose your photograph. If you can’t see the “Change background image” link, then it hasn’t been rolled out in your country yet but should be in the next few days.

Before

After

iSyndica Micro stock

If you’re a photographer, designer or illustrator who submits images to micro stock agencies, you may have used or heard about iSyndica. Their tagline is  “Upload Once, Sell Everywhere”. It’s a web site that has been around for a while and offers users the ability to upload their images to the iSyndica site and have them distributed to over 30 stock agencies. They distribute your photos, illustrations, audio and video to the stock sites along with your keywords and descriptions, so it’s a major timesaver for anyone selling images. Once you start selling you can track your sales, all from the one site.

Supported stocks include Fotolia, Smugmug, Dreamstime and Veer.

How much?

iSyndica is a subscription service, so you pay a fee for storage and distribution. There are three different subscription levels starting with a very basic free option to try out the service for 15 days. The Standard plan costs $45.99 per year with 5GB of storage and 1000 monthly credits. Premium costs $79.99 with 20GB of storage and 5000 credits and Pro costs $149.99 with 50B of storage and 5000 credits. The number of credits you use varies depending on the type of media you are distributing. Photos and illustrations use 1 credit while Audio uses 5 credits and video uses 10 credits for distribution.

I haven’t used the service myself but it seems like a  good tool for micro stockers.

Have you used iSyndica to distribute and sell images? Did you find it useful?