Social media images
dlscott56
Registered Users Posts: 1,324 Major grins
Does anyone offer social media sized digital files to their customers? If so, is there a good size to allow decent viewing on social media but to small for printing?
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I offer them to all my clients. They are included in the disc that contains the hi-rez, non watermarked for printing files. However, on the lo-rez social media files, I watermark them for advertising purposes. I resize to 800 on the long end. Makes a small file but larger enough for facebook, definitely not suitable for printing. My hi rez files are generally too large to upload to fb without problems so I don't worry about that. If they do, oh well. More about the convenience factor for the client.
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
As a customer, who wants to share the images I paid for with my friends and family, I don't want your watermark all over my pictures. I would shy away from using anyone who thought I should be a source of advertising for them in that sense.
It depends on what you agreed to pay for.
If the agreement was a flat fee for a photo session and a CD of all the image files, (say, $250 for something like a senior portrait) then you are right that those files should not be watermarked and you should be able to use them however you want.
Or if you paid for a digital file of a single image, it should not be watermarked and you should be able to use it however you want.
If you paid for a print of an image, it should not be watermarked, and almost nothing is stopping you from scanning it and using it however you want, but technically this is illegal. But just because you paid for one print does not mean you are entitled to have the photographer also supply you with a clean digital copy for use on social media.
Now, the OP wants to discourage printing of the image, presumably because the customer is not paying for it, or not paying enough. That is, it's either a giveaway, or it's a deep-discount price for social media use only. In that case, the image needs to be watermarked.
An "accurate" reproduction of a scene and a good photograph are often two different things.
As far as watermarks go, I don't really see why anyone would oppose to a well done watermarking of the image. After all, studios have been putting these on the prints they sell to clients for years.
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What you reference is a printmark. That is the text at the bottom or corner of the print. It is different than the watermark. Both are valuable tools to use and this http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/96482-what-is-the-difference-between-a-watermark-and-a-printmark- is a quick, short explanation of the differences.
Yes, I know what you mean. I guess I was still thinking of it as watermark since we're referring to it's use here on a digital image.
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I occasionally get off on making sure the minute details are correct and miss the bigger meanings. My apologies.
With a lot of my work, I am going the other way these days.
I prefer to not sell them a print and rather encourage them to buy a USB with the images on it they CAN print themselves. I consistently make much more money ( Gross and net profit) from the digital images than I do prints.
Maybe it would be profitable for you to offer what the client wants and create a product that IS digital images they can print out. You could do it as electronic images only OR, as an add on that they can purchase the electronic copy of the PRINTS they have purchased at an extra $xx per image.
I know others have many different Views but I suggest to my clients they can go get them printed as many times as they want, email them, make Christmas cards, put them on slide shows etc.
It's simply value adding to the product which allows me to get more for it that what I can get for prints on their own and I don't have the time and cost factor of getting prints made.
I'm selling so many USB's these days I am having my own designs made and logo printed by a supplier in china and still saving on what I can buy regular ones for. Client gets them on the spot to take home which is another Value added.
This is not out of the question for me. I'm really experimenting right now to find out what will be more profitable in the long run. Currently I'm testing the print/product only process. I follow closely other professional photography businesses to see what they do and how busy they seem to be. I know several local pros who have very successful businesses whom I'm close enough with to know really are doing well. Some are selling almost exclusively digital packages and some almost exclusively product.
I'm not sure what's best for me right now. I do know that I've lost some jobs due to the fact that I am not selling a DVD/USB of images for them to get printed. And, in some cases, when I take a look at what my profit would have been from them buying print packages vs the digital images I probably should have done it. So how do you price things to allow selling either model to capture the best of both worlds?
I'm sure I will be playing around with this for a while until I find what's right for me.
I'm always interested to see what works for others and what their particular market is, which does make a difference.
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I listen to what the clients say and ask for and I test market pretty much constantly.
I'm into a diverse range of interests and the overwhelming common thread I see on the internet these days is people want the guaranteed answer straight up and they won't take any risks and see how things apply to THEM.
I like to test and trial and fine tune things so I can see what works for me and what doesn't.
For me, offering digital images came about simply because the clients asked for it. First I offered CD's which a lot of people likes but I also got a fair amount of resentment over the price. I priced them the same as my top package. Why should they be anything less when the client can do so much more with them? I priced them as a preimum product. it didn't interfere with the products I was offering, it was just an addition.
Disks sold well but frankly were a pain in the backside to produce. I had to burn the disk, get the cases, print and cut slicks, print the disks... It was a lot of time to create a professional presentation.
There was also the price objection.
I thought about mobile phone downloads but that seemed too difficult yet so next thing was USB's.
I simply replaced the CD offering and added the price ( and a bit more ) of the thumbdrives. People loved it. I bought 10 to try the idea with and my girls rang me before lunchtime the first day to see when I was bringing more over as they were almost out.
The 2nd day, I put the price up another $5 and it didn't make a bit of difference to the sales. By this time I was sooo far ahead of what I made on the full packages both in profit and time, I was laughing.
I still had the regular print offerings, I hadn't eaten into them at all, I had just added something that made me more money. At the same time, I was also tuning my print packages. My girls picked up that they were getting asked for something different to what we offered and using the sort of initiative I love but money can't buy, saw in the printer software we use that there was a preset that satisfied this request. She Printed a sample, put a price on it that was better (for us) that what we were offering and It took about 1 hour of offering it when 64% of customers bought it to know it was a winner. That's my best selling product right now.
Today I had someone request something different to the New thing I started on the weekend. While the new idea was well recieved, it is a bit more mucking round and more finicky than I would like ideally. Still, You have to test these things. The woman today was a walk away but before she did, I told her, what about if I could do this that and the other? She lit up and said that would be perfect. I said great, Give me 15 Min and come back. I showed her what I did and she was stoked. So was the other woman standing next to her when she saw it and started asking my girl if she could have that too.
1St woman asks how much extra is that, I put a hefty $10 on the price of the standard print and again they were both happy with that. Guess what off the cuff product sold 2nd best today?
We didn't even print a sample, just told people what it was and "Yep, I'll have that". It IS a little more work to produce but I'm sure with some practice and a PS action I'll get it down to not much more time for good extra money.
The way I look at it, I only have so many clients so the trick is to get the most possible out of every single one. It's not about reinventing the wheel, it's about fiddling with the fine tuning dial till you get the best, clearest sounding music to your ears. For me that's the sound of the EFTPOS machine printing out yet another docket for a happy customer.
I'm still not happy though. I would like to get away from printing as much as possible despite having more printers set up than most sane photographers and having ordered photo paper by the pallet load. (Literally).
The problem with putting all the images on USB is cost. I have been using 4& 8 G sticks but I'm sensing that the capacity isn't as critical as -I- thought in being able to use the drives for something else.
As such, I'm thinking of getting some small, Probably 1 G sticks which I can get for Under $2 and offering them on the smaller USB packages. I think I'm pretty much at the limit where if I go Higher on price it will cut into sales so I may have to take a small per sale dip in profit and see if the design of the Drives I'm having made makes up for it in the impulse factor and visual appeal of the drives i'm offering. I'm pretty confident it will but maybe it won't and maybe again, the feedback will steer me in another direction and that may be better still.
I don't have any one way of working. I like to try as many different things as possible. The beauty is the more you try the better and wider you experience base becomes and the more your eyes get opened. Every time I think I have things sorted, Some will suggest something or I'll get another hairbrained idea, test it out and then replace something else I'm offering with the new thing that works better.
The thing you have to do is TRIAL new things. and don't just test it on one clients, test it on 10. Also with the test products, add it to what you are already offering and price it in a way that can only increase your bottom line not take away from it. Also, be a bit pedantic and keep numbers. I'm always surprising myself how I can sit there and sell pics all day and at the end of it, My predictions on the order of best sellers from best to worst is off. I can always get the first one because it's a clear leader but after that, It can sometimes vary and my perception of the ratio of what we sold is usually not good.
Keep score so you KNOW whats happening and then keep refining it. Don't offer anything unless there is a benefit to YOU in doing so.
But whatever you do, test, test and test some more.