Case Study: How Difficult Is It to Build Stock Photo Websites? - yeltonthationothe

Stock photography websites mostly seem trenchant and shield-shaped. Users often don't symmetrical envisage how much clock time and attempt is invisible under the hood. So, is information technology really hard to make and launch a site sharing stock photos? Let's discuss cardinal ways.

Easy Direction: Buying a Template

If you want IT for cheap, IT's easy. Upright Google for a stock photography marketplace template and see what you get. All it takes is a WordPress hosting, a semi-technical person, and something like $62 for a paid theme.

Heavyset, a popular theme with 1100+ downloads

Hard Way: Developing From Scratch

For us, information technology took 9 months to build Alces alces from scratch.

Elk, the ancestry photography internet site that we've highly-developed at Icons8

We've been a team of 4 who were involved between 80 and 40%:

• A backend developer
• Two front-end developers
• A fashion designer
• A full-time editor program World Health Organization was labeling and tagging the pictures.

The innovation was a collective effort, involving our post-production team, a 3D modeller, a 3D artist, SEO expert, and some replicate. It doesn't let in the production of the images.

Why So Hard

The front-end, although passed finished two iterations before the release, was an lenient part.

The first version of our design: tested, but never released. Compare it with what we sustain now.

The hardest part is the backend. It guides the images from the moment they're shot in Tender files to the searchable and navigable data published connected the site.

Backend

All images pass these phases:

• Being shot in the studio, resulting in the RAW files.
• Photographer filters the optimal shots and uploads them to Google Drive. Each vista has a separate folder.

Kate in the bathrobe has a different folder, not the one of Kate in the office setting.

• Somebody from our post-production team makes the people of color correction and drags the folder to a Google Drive called Moose Website.
• Via Google Get API, the internet site catches this and publishes the photos on the website. From this moment happening, they're searchable, though only with the keywords from the folder name.
• The aforementioned individual marks the category for these images (such as Lulu). From this moment happening, they're published in the category.
• Post-production starts retouching the images and saving them to the identical Indian file connected the Google Cause.

Our backend understands it is the same file, but retouched, and marks it as Retouched.

• Somebody from the tagging team passes the images and tags them with many tags and some smart titles.

For tagging, we use our internal tool, similar to the one Shutterstock and many other websites have. You choose the likewise looking pictures and get the lean of the possible tags. You mark the checkboxes, add some custom ones, done.

Titles are the integral antithetical thing. It takes creativeness to call this picture "Don't cry over spilled vanish".

Creative naming: "Don't cry over spilled vanish"

• The images set about repacked in a single zip file (we provide downloading all our jpeg files at ounce).

More Backend

Thither're different scenarios I didn't mention:

• Group editing the tags
• Removing the files
• Handling the RAW files (we preserve them)
• Sorting the search results
• Searching the categories
• Counting downloads for statistics
• Choosing the images for the front page

Common for All Websites

There're some of the operations frequent to all the websites, non clean stock photography ones.

SEO: keywords search, clustering, planning the URL structure, writing page titles, meta tags, sitemaps (we don't have one yet)
Copy: front page (we've got our tagline corrected after the launching, as a ProductHunt phallus offered a healthier i), microcopy (like button labels), meta descriptions
Examination: testing on the mobile devices, performance testing, fixing 100s of bugs (not 1000s like in our former apps – Icons8 and Lunacy), and examination again.

And everything mentioned is but the beginning: then, the M-represent of maintenance and marketing comes.

What would you add to the list?

About the author: Ivan Wernher Magnus Maximilian von Braun, UX designer, founder of Icons8
Title image by Moose

Determine our draw How to Steal Commonplace Photos and Ways to Get Them De jure and a set of tips on making money submitting images to stock exposure websites

Do you have an interesting case study to share with our readers? Let's get it published.

Source: https://blog.icons8.com/articles/case-study-build-stock-photo-websites/

Posted by: yeltonthationothe.blogspot.com

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