Stock Photos Site Fotolia Launches Fotolia Instant, An App For Selling Your Smartphone Photos
Online microstock photos marketplace Fotolia, a Shutterstock rival now based out of New York, is today making another move on mobile with the launch of an app that allows users to earn money from their smartphone photos. The app, Fotolia Instant, is much like many of the social photos apps on the market in that it lets you snap photos, apply filters, then share. But it also includes more professional tools, too – for example, it allows you to manually control exposure and aperture separately.
By making it possible to submit photos directly from smartphones, Fotolia is hoping that will allow both professional and non-professional photographers to explore this new platform while allowing the company to create a new stream of revenue.
Photography enthusiasts have taken to various consumer-facing services and apps over the years, including sites like Yahoo’s Flickr and, more recently, with the growing Toronto-based photo-sharing service 500px, which raised its $8.8 million A round this summer. These sites serve as a way for photographers to build an audience and establish a profile or portfolio, but today stop short of offering commercial marketplaces for photos (though 500px says this is now in the works). Fotolia Instant is aiming to attract those same enthusiast users, while also pulling in more photos from pro photographers who want easier tools for mobile submissions.
The company explains that the addition of the new collection will allow end users to source photos that have a more updated, modern and “in the moment” look to them. That would be an advantage over some rivals, whose stock photo collections feel dated, fixed and posed. As Fotolia’s Director of Marketing (N. America) Leo Tran recently explained, “the application is our way of supporting the ‘phonography’ community and the changing needs of consumers,” he said. “We think this release will be an important one for photography as we will be the first major worldwide microstock agency to fully throw our support towards ‘phonography’ and be able to deliver a curated collection on a greater scale because of our worldwide presence.”
He says the arrival of the Fotolia Instant mobile app is not so much a new direction for the company overall, but one that it hopes will better leverage current technological and social trends around the sharing of mobile photos.
Fotolia Instant is available for download here on iTunes. An Android app is due next month, and an iPad app will soon follow which will also allow users to browse Fotolia’s library and download images to their devices or Dropbox accounts.