Clustershot is a new site that may interest a lot of photographers. It isn’t a stock photography agency but offers instead the potential to be used as an independent stock photo licensing solution for photographers.

Clustershot are not actively working in an agency role but simply providing the technology to facilitate sales. So throwing your images up onto the site and sitting back waiting for sales is unlikely to work with Clustershot. For that you need a stock photography agency that is promoting their collections to buyers. Clustershot is taking more of a facilitator approach by providing an ecommerce solution for photographers to make their work available for purchase online.

It is therefore up to the photographer to direct buyers to their images. This wont work for many stock photographers, for whom the attraction of stock photography is they can forget about marketing efforts amongst other things!  However for those who do have a direct relationship with some buyers and clients I think Clustershot could be attractive way of making more direct sales while still retaining the automated benefits of working through an agency.

The thing that makes Clustershot really attractive are some of the figures involved. They are only taking a 12% administrative fee on sales meaning the cut to photographers is 88%.  Even given the above points about them not really working as an agency this strikes me as generously high. There is also the option to upgrade to ‘pro’ status which allows you to effectively create your own branded site. This is only $20; about 1/3 the price of a clikpic site with the stock ecommerce admin already integrated. While the Clustershot offering might not quite be on a par I acn’t help comparing it with Photoshelter too; at a considerably cheaper price.

The major drawback I can see at presnt with Clustershot is it only supports Royalty Free Licensing. If you’re a purely microstock shooter looking to create your own direct sales outlet this isn’t a problem. However I, like many stock photographers, have more Rights Managed stock than I do RF, so Clustershot at present is only of use for creating a RF photography store.

On the upside a great feature coming soon is a partnership with Tineye that will mean all images on Clustershot are indexed by them. This can both help potential buyers find your work and you keep tabs on where your images are being used.

Despite the fact I’d put myself in the category of lazy self-aware photographers who’d rather leave the business side of things to the agencies I’ve stumped up my $20 to give the clustershot pro option a go. Click here to have a look at my ‘site’.

So far I’ve added 400 odd of my RF images from both micro and traditional pricing models. I don’t put the same or similar images across different price brackets. One thing that strikes me is that this mix at the same outlet may not be a good idea; I’ll be thinking about that. Clustershot make it very easy to add images via a number of methods. You can import through rss or atom feeds, integrate a Flickr account or, as I did, use their WebDav which creates a virtual networked drive on your local machine that you drop your files into to upload. It worked. Easily.

In keeping with their purely facilitator’s role Clustershot do not edit. You’re not submitting, but uploading. In fact you can simply import or upload low res versions to showcase and mark them as open to offers, then supply the required resolution if and when you make a sale.

Clustershot uses the Flickr API and, in a way, effectively provides any photographer using Flickr a quick way to commercialise their uploads, should anyone want to share for some cash in return for a picture to use! So we now have Getty Images cherry picking from the Flickr collection on the one hand while Clustershot offers the democracy of a true free for anyone who’d like to try and make a sale from their images. An interesting choice; 20% from the big boys or 88% from the unknown upstart?

The image seen in the screen grab at the start of this post is from zpaperboys photography and can be found here.