Office Divvy Interns Review: IMGembed

Office Divvy Interns Review: IMGembed

An Office Divvy Team Product Review

We asked some of our team to give their opinion of IMGembed, a stock image licensing service designed to benefit both the artist and the searcher/seeker. Monica, an Office Divvy junior associate, and amateur photographer, took the lead in creating an account and uploading a picture. Here’s Monica’s take:

The rest of our team took on more of a consumer explorer role. Instead of submitting imagery, they assumed the scenario of needing an image for one of our digital projects. Their thoughts:

Trenton-product-review-picture
 
TRENTON

Seeker/Tech Perspective

 
 
Pros:

  • Once uploaded to the website, the photos are available for use with permission. They’re also free.
  • All photos are hosted on a cloud service, so no downloading is required. It’s as easy as copying and pasting an image embed code into your website/blog.
  • No signup is required. However, if you do choose to create an account, you can do it using any of the newer, popular photo-uploading social media sites like Instagram, Flickr, etc.  All of those photos are available for creating albums, uploading images, etc.
  • Creators are able to track where their images have been used and get due recognition; they’re auto-attributed with said creator’s name labeled underneath.
  • Creators can also profit through the premium non-attributed use of their images by users.
  • Overall, this seems like a pretty good service.

Cons:

  • The website is still fairly new so there isn’t as many images available as you’d expect on a site like Flickr.
  • Users can only customize the image width to approximately 550px width and height. Still, this can be fixed easily by changing the width and height within the image source’s HTML.

Kedron-product-review-picture
 
KEDRON 

Seeker/Content Creator

 
 
Pros:

  • IMGembed offers image embeds, which generates codes for websites to copy/paste within their HTML. The attribution is regenerated on every image view. It doesn’t require any manual coding/upload or download.
  • IMGembed supports the fair use of images online: your images belong to you.
  • I would like to mention the fact that even though they are new, as Trenton stated before, IMGembed does have millions of images available.
  • It seems pretty reliable.

Cons:

  • Yes, IMGembed is free to use, but it takes a 30% cut when creators manage to sell their images by CPM (Cost Per Thousand–the price of 1,000 advertisement impressions per webpage) pricing.

Alex-product-review-picture
 
ALEX

Seeker/Content Creator

 
 
Pros:

  • From browsing through IMGembed’s galleries, images appear to be tagged efficiently. That’s a start.
  • IMGembed allows visitors to search, sell, and donate photos directly on the homepage.
  • Handling image prices, watermarks, etc. adds convenience.


Cons:

  • It doesn’t seem possible to separate your search items with commas. So when you search something like “long black hair,” instead “black girls,” with the tag of “black,” permeates the search. Not girls with long, black hair. Actually, many of the girls in the photos had short hair.
  • The search engine appears faulty in some areas. After doing a few searches of “spark” or “sparks,” I arrived at images of national parks, flowers, or people’s faces. Another time, I searched “water” and was taken to images of water buffalo and, then, cannons. Questionable relevance, I’d say.  It’s a recurring issue.

Ivana-product-review-picture
 
IVANA

Seeker/Business Perspective

 
 
Pros:

  • The images are free to use with permission.
  • Beneficial to both the user and the creator.
  • It’s user friendly: easy to search and find works and also to sell and buy.
  • Imbedding images is easy, too. The site is very responsive and it’s visually appealing.
  • To its credit, there’re many positive reviews from established and accredited tech sites.


Cons:

  • Searching can be laggy. A couple of times, simple searches made the webpage behave erratically (only one photo shown in the free category after I had typed in as basic a word as “flower.”)
  • Artists are able to remove or disassociate an image from a website or blog post whenever they choose, damaging the aesthetic.
  • There’s probably more value to these functions for a freelance artist or photographer than a typical consumer. You could call it specialized, though that’s not necessarily a con.

Mike-product-review-picture
 
MICHAEL

Seeker/Tech Perspective

 
Pros:

  • It allows for easy content distribution.
  • It’s a quick way to access free professional-quality images.


Cons:

  • The search time could be faster with greater accuracy.
  • The filters could be a bit better.
  • A “follow” button would be a nice add-on.

LISA – Decision Maker

IMGembed got our attention because it was suggested by a friend (thanks Ersin) and iStock’s recent changes made us want to look elsewhere. This review is part of our research to see what else is out there for us.

Pros:

Cons:

  • DRM (Digital Rights Management): Our team initially uploaded a pic we had not yet secured the rights to. There was no visible prompting for this.
  • PRICE: Framework to help the user price their images for use was not visible. Across our large team, we would wind up with inconsistent results.
  • SEARCH: All tagging is left to the end user (his/her knowledge of keywords, descriptions, search terms). There is no prompting or automatic suggestions. The search results we were seeing in the team’s review reflect tags/keywords upon upload were lacking.

 

Bottom Line

IMGembed does not seem to be a perfect fit for Office Divvy at this time. Onward and upward with more product reviews. Next in line: Pixabay

Do you have an opinion about IMGembed? Feel free to chime in with your comment below, or tweet us at @AskTheInterns

Kedron Abbott
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