Workers are seen harvesting rice outside of Hsipaw, Myanmar (Burma) in 2006. Photo by Josh Gerritsen, a PhotoShelter user.
PhotoShelter is out to make good on its name, looking to become a secure alternative for photographers tired of having their images stolen from Flickr. The online photography storage site geared toward professionals has a new import tool to quickly and easily migrate photos from Flickr to PhotoShelter.
The new Flickr importer makes it dead simple to move your Flickr photos over to PhotoShelter - just login into your PhotoShelter account, select "Import from Flickr" from the pull-down menu and the Import Tool will upload the selected images to your account.
In a particularly nice touch, the importer is in fact an exporter as well, offering an easy way to send your PhotoShelter images over to Flickr where you can take advantage of the sharing and community aspects of the site, something PhotoShelter doesn't offer.
[UPDATE, Wed March 5, 4:00PM PST] According to PhotoShelter, Flickr has disabled the PhotoShelter transfer tool for reasons currently unknown. PhotoShelter says its team is currently working to resolve the issue so its users can start initiating transfers again, and it hopes to have access to Flickr restored within the next day or two. We don't expect there's anything malicious at play (Flickr has a track record for being a good neighbor to other photo sites) but we'll give you an update as soon as we learn more.
While Flickr is a more popular site and offers a thriving community, Flickr also makes it very easy for the less scrupulous to steal images, something that's become increasingly common. Many seem to think that Flickr is a free image database -- though in fact that's not the case.
Photographer Lane Hartwell, whose Flickr images were used without permission, credit or compensation in the recent viral video, "Here Comes Another Bubble," accused the video's creators of stealing. "I'm not a charity," said Hartwell, "This is my living."
PhotoShelter takes a different approach to image sharing than Flickr, one that's more suited to the professional photographer. Rather than simple image sharing, PhotoShelter offers the ability to overlay a personal watermark on all your photos, and web galleries can be password protected to limit access to clients. Be sure to check out our full review for more details.
In fact, shortly after the "Bubble" video debacle, Hartwell gutted her Flickr account and claimed she was moving over to PhotoShelter. And she isn't alone, PhotoShelter has attracted about 19,000 members since its launch in 2005.
Allen Murabayashi, founder and CEO of PhotoShelter, says members include everyone from Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers to "weekend warriors" who want to try their hand at commercial photography.
PhotoShelter is not a Flickr alternative, but is geared at the pro photographer looking to catalog, store and sell their images online. That said, some Flickr users who are getting more serious about their images and are considering a possible career shift might want to have a look at PhotoShelter.
And thanks to the new Flickr Importer, using both sites at the same time is a snap.
Although PhotoShelter won't be announcing the features until tomorrow, existing users should see the Flickr Import option when they login today.
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