Acclaim Images

Acclaim was at one time one of Photoconnect's direct competitors in that it it took in images from other photographers and garnered business by doing well in Google searches. Now it too has put up the signs regarding not taking in new photos - or photographers presumably.

After I stopped taking in new photographers here and Photoconnect became essentially just me, I felt fine about trying to sell my own images through Acclaim and uploaded about 80 images. Of these I only fed about 30 through to go live on the site because although my images carried IPTC data, it was still an unexpected slog getting them onto the site proper.

Athough on the outside Acclaim seemed a slick operation, on the inside things were a little different and the clarity of purpose seen in Fred Voetsch's postings on the StockPhoto group etc was replaced by a variety of messages giving the impression of a folksy setup trying to mix it with the big boys. In particular the obscure and/or lengthy image requests were coming thick and fast, a little like MyLoupe (another failure for me) and I was getting the impression that I had signed up for OnRequest images, not a stock photo site.

I looked at the sales page (for the whole site - they are quite open with this information) a couple of days ago and while I would be very happy to see something similar at photoconnect in terms of the number of images sold, there was no way that I could see this level of sales supporting Acclaim and its staff. That has been borne out by today's news of 3 staff being laid off. Since 2 are family members it must all be a bit emotional right now.

So it seems that Acclaim, like photoconnect, will sit there high in the searches and continue running. It seems that there will be a purge of images (there was a pointed post on StockPhoto a couple of weeks ago re similars).

Now where for photoconnect?