Hello,
I have just put my travel portfolio up for review and library submission. I had a great response from about 25 different libraries. I have narrowed the libraries down to a few but though they look like big companies with a lot of sales and images; I have not found much about any of them while searching through forums.
I can't understand it unless these are really small and rather unknown libraries.

After reviewing my images, these libraries really want to represent my work, so I'm stoked about that; but obviously it's a big deal to me trying to decide the right one for my work for the next 5 years. I'm not worried about my images being accepted as I shoot at the highest quality and other libraries have quickly accepted my images from a technical standpoint. Of course a library will only take a small number of my images as did Lonely Planet, but I plan on having to go through a variety of libraries. I just need to pick one to be my main library for first submissions after lonely planet

I figured one might be more renowned than the other.

Have you heard anything about these stock libraries? Are they good?

Danita Delimont
Age Fotostock (Spain, NY)
First light (canada) Argus (Asia)
Eye Ubiquitous/Hutchinson

Or Should I just resort to Alamy? I've heard some good things with Alamy; but as it is so massive, it seems it might be better for me to go through a somewhat smaller agency that will actively go out and use a sales team to market my images specifically.

I have a number of my images already represented by Lonely Planet; but I have a huge stock of images waiting for rep.

Other interested libraries are also:

- novastock
- focus new zealand
- jaytravelphotos
- plans ltd.
- accent alaska
- Kiefer Nature Stock
- Outside Imagery
- the photolibrary group (garden picture library, fresh food images, oxford scientific)
- photoagora
- out of the blue
- the image finders
- okapia
- dkstock
- animalsanimals
- lightwave
- photoshelter
- dreams of the blue
- rainbow

Thanks so much for the help. Maybe there is a forum somewhere or website which offers reviews of stock libraries?

thx,
Micah
www.iisource.net

Thank for the well thought out post. I am not familiar with any of these agencies, but there may be a few reasons why. Most of the topics on this forum are for the newer microstock agencies that sell images between $1 - $10 a piece. Many of us photographers agree to this model because the sell many images a day. Another reason that they may not be discussed here is that they are not as well known (at least not to me). I tend to stay away from agencies that have less than 100,000 images. If you have a specialized collection of images, this may not be as important, but at the end of the day people like options, so if there search only returns 5 images of the topic, they may move on to the next site on Google.

While smaller agencies may have active sales teams, they also maybe "floaters" or agencies that are run as a side business for a smart computer guy, who doesn't have capital to grow the business quickly (I have done this and decided against the idea after about 4 months). Anyhow, getting images into large agency may seem counter-intuitive because they already have so many, but in my opinion this is still the best route to start. Once you have a solid portfolio with the big players, then you can spend spare time appying to smaller agencies in case they make it. It is soo easy to start up a stock photography agency on the internet that you never know how long some will last. Even some of the best ideas (like LuckyOliver) don't alway pull it off as expected.

Hope this help a bit. I will be looking into some of these sites this evening.