Imagepick launches royalty-free image bank

When two former C-level executives leave a monolith like Getty Images it’s a fair bet that they will go and create something smaller, faster moving and a lot less hide-bound by the restraints of picture royalties.

And sure enough that’s exactly what happened. Founded and funded by ex-Getty Images CFO Lawrence Gould and former Getty Images director of e-commerce, Tom Donnelly, ImagePick is a new startup which allows you to buy and own the rights to royalty free images so you can use them as much as you like for your marketing, websites, you name it. And the idea is not to provide royalty free pictures which are basically crap, as is the case normally. ImagePick has a team of editors who look at images prior to their being added to the database. It’s already got providers of royalty free images signed up, including Corbis, Jupiterimages, Blend, Rubberball and Westend61.

I like the Google-like interface and the big results page of thumbnails. Its also easy to add images to a ‘pasteboard’ and build up a selection for later purchase. It’s not for anyone however. ‘Web resolution’ images start at around £55.

Is this a Web 2.0 site? Probably not. No social networking, no widgets! But that’s not quite the issue. The implementation is pretty good and it does what it says on the tin. Plus, every image is tagged with the visual elements of the picture, I assume by editors. Adding tagging by users would be a smart move. I also think they should consider adding freely available PR/press photos – that would seed the market and help create more of a destination site for consumers as well as professionals.