Our Review: 

Photocase is a German based creative community and crowdsourced stock agency that was launched in 2001. The site is somewhat different to mainstream microstock sites for various reasons:

 

  • No FTP upload (quality over volume)
     
  • Higher sale prices than average
     
  • A 'Creative' ethic to image acceptance (words like abstract, unusual, arty, different, Lomo, cross-processed "off the wall" etc. would be used to describe the Photocase collection).
     
  • Free credits for each accepted image allows 'an exchange' of images from community members - prima!
     
  • No Referral Program or API.

 

Over the past few years the site has grown a good sized image collection (very small by mainstream standards) and a community of nearly a half million users.

By comparison to microstock Photocase accept the unusual, and will almost certainly reject any 'nice pretty stock' you upload to them. To compare to magazines, Photocase images are much more 'monster children' than 'ideal homes'.

I've had a few sales (downloads with earnings) from a small portfolio. Each image accepted rewards you with download credits to access other photos on the site. You earn Income when a photo is purchased but not when one is downloaded using the download credits earned by other photographers. Most of my downloads have been from other contributors - hence earning nothing. The plus side of this is that I have a ready supply of interesting stock photography I can download. This reminds me more of the bartering system iStock (I think) once used.

While it might seem that a 10+ year old site should have built a larger image collection it certainly does not seem that Photocase is in stagnation (perhaps steady and sustainable rather than venture capital bang-and-bust). The community is very much active, as I wrote above this site is quite (very!) different to mainstream microstock; quality over quantity, very much a niche style. If you choose to upload to Photocase it will be because you have a supply of creative images similar to those you see on the site, not because "it's another microstock" to distribute through.

 

Conclusion

It's hard to measure Photocase against a mainstream microstock agency; the numbers don't measure up well. The images I've uploaded to Photocase are not from my normal microstock portfolio, so I can't compare sales to other sites on a level playing field. I like Photocase, the images on there and the community. If you are currently uploading 'creative stuff' to agencies and having it rejected, or currently not trying to monetise it and just displaying it on Flickr (et al) then photocase might well be worth a look.

I have uploaded a different set of images to photocase than to all the other agencies making direct comparison unfair, in recent years my earnings have dried up (up to 2015) - there may be a bias towards recent uploads are photocase.

In 2019 Photocase announced some financial difficulties the upshot of which is that around 75 euros was wiped from my account in a "we either do this or go out of business" move. at the moment I can't recommend photocase.

 

photodune

Visit photocase.comt

 

Site Details
Real US$ Cost of 1 Standard Image: 
22 (compare prices)
Referral Scheme: 
None (compare rates)
Cost of a standard image (1600x1200) 2MP approx: 
10 Credits
Royalty Rate: 
20% increasing to 50% based on portfolio size and sales (reduced from 40% min Apr 2019) (compare)
Cost of 1 Credit (basic): 
$ 2.2
FTP Upload: 
No
Site Statistics
Approx. size of photo collection (0 = no current estimate): 
600,000 Images (compare)
Alexa Traffic Rank: 
233293 (a measure of the site popularity, lower number is better)
Alexa 3 Month Change: 
7680% (measurement of the increase of site popularity compared with three months ago, negative is a decrease)
Launched: 
2001
Community
Photographers: 
15000
photocase.com
Overall Rating: 
3/10 (compare sites)

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