14:00 to 15:00

With billions of images being taken every day, sourcing of mobile phone content has become an obvious monetizing opportunity. But are common smartphone users shooting the type of images that customers are willing to pay for? Which are the sophisticated technologies available to qualify big data of visual content by commercial criteria? Will mobile images bypass the stock photo industry or will they end up being distributed by the traditional players? Just a few of the questions being asked to our panelists.

Panelists: Alan Capel (Alamy), Johan Andersson (Pickit), Severin Matusek (Eyeem) and Dustin Plett (500px). The panel will be moderated by Pieter Doorman (Imageselect).

15:15 to 16:15

Fair is Fair! The business has changed dramatically in recent years and the rights demanded in contracts have expanded to the point that little is left for the rights holder. Is it still possible for a creator to make a living solely by licensing images? Can a rights holder/creator, acting as an equal, negotiate a fair and reasonable contract with a publisher; a contract that allows both to work to mutual advantage? Has the inability to keep track of image assets and their associated rights forced publishers to create the current predatory contracts?

Join a distinguished panel of industry professionals including Alexander Koch (BVPA), Johan Främst (BLF) and Jim Pickerell (Selling Stock) with Eugene Mopsik as moderator for a lively discussion of these questions and of the current state of contract terms and pricing. Bring your questions and contribute!

16:30 to 17:30

As first seen at the DMLA Conference in New York in October 2015, CEPIC is proposing this seminar on The Business of Free. It doesn’t really matter whether you are welcoming it or not. Free content is rushing into the marketplace and grabbing the attention of an increasing audience. It has all the potential to be the next game changer in our industry. You wonder why companies are willing to offer content for free? How do they manage to convince individual artists to produce images for them? Is free content going to attract paying customers or is it going to introduce more customers to professional content? Don’t ignore free – it will matter to your business sooner than you might think. Attend this eye-opening panel to know when and how.

Panelists: Joaquin Cuenca Abela (Freepik), Liam Bailey (Photocrowd), Greta Pittard (VideoBlocks) and Tomas Speight (Panthermedia). The moderator of this session is Martin Skultety (StockFood).

The Table Area is located on the ground floor (Grand Ballroom).
The Business Rooms are located on the first floor.
More info

Metadata is of high value for many parties in the photo business: photographers, libraries, agencies, archives. But many consider this only in a very limited context, not across many transitions in a supply chain or for a longer period. This conference will address how to avoid losing information when images are moved from one person or system to the next one or if they are kept in an archive for a long term. More info

Coffee Break

The Cultural Heritage seminar looks at how heritage institutions are managing “to reconcile the twin objectives of maximising public access to their digital content while promoting their financial sustainability”, and how the decisions made by museums and other heritage institutions will impact on many members of CEPIC which represent these images. The seminar will bring together both the suppliers (heritage) and their distributors (agencies) to discuss the issues that are of concern to both.

Panelists: Jeff Cowton (Museum Wordsworth Trust), Sandra Powlette (British Library), Thomas Pey (akg-images) and David Price-Hughes (Bridgeman). Moderator: Andrea Stern (MOCA). More info

Some people argue that licensing on the internet is a reverse process. Website owners are copying images and pay only once they were caught by the copyright holder. For many agencies with higher price points infringements are not an exception, they seem to be the rule. So should you watermark your images even if your competitors are not? How can you fight those (ab)users avoiding to compensate you for your work? This expert panel will put the industry’s most experienced copyright defenders in front of you. Learn about what you should do to protect your content and how to monetize on infringements efficiently.

Panelists: Shaun Curry (Pixelrights), Joel Miller (PicScout) and Marcus Schmitt (Copytrack). Moderator: Alfonso Gutiérrez (age fotostock)

The Future of Keywording Auto-tagging will replace manual metadata

Machine learning has the potential to become the next big thing in our industry. Image recognition technology is able to classify and tag images. Saving cost for manpower sounds like a great support to the financial bottom line of any photo agency. But it is also going to lower the entry barriers for new players into our industry. When resource intensive keywording will be replaced by a simple API, can anyone become a stock photo agency? Let’s ask those who should know. Our panel hosts traditional service providers as well as the founders of deep learning systems.

Panelists are Mark Milstein (Microstocksolutions), Emmanuel Prat (Deepiks) and Hemant Mehta (India Picture). The moderator of the session will be professor Kai Barthel (Pixolution/HTW Berlin).

A few years ago, Adobe made the transition to Creative Cloud, a collection of creative applications and services with a vision of connectivity. You can start a project on your phone, continue it on your tablet, and then finish it on the desktop – everything is connected. Dennis Radeke, Development Manager for video at Adobe Stock, will talk about how Adobe is solving problems for creatives through technology, Creative Sync, and Adobe Stock.

The party that brings the industry together. Address of the venue: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, Av. Dubrovnik 17, 10 000 Zagreb