AfricanStockPhoto

Stock photography platform for and from Africa

1 follower

Stock photography platform for and from Africa

1 follower

AfricanStockPhoto is a stock photography platform for and from Africa. Our royalty-free content database is populated by a community of hundreds of photographers across the continent, and updated daily. Our photographers reject the stereotypical notion of Africa as a homogeneous continent consisting only of poverty, tribal warriors and savannahs.

Launch tags:Design Tools•Marketing•Photography

Launch Team

Viktor.comAn AI coworker that actually does the work

Promoted

Congratulations on your launch here! I'm glad to finally see a stocked image repository dedicated to people of color. However, I would like to ask a few questions. 1. Nappy was launched few months ago on Product Hunt offering free African stock images. It proved itself a promising work in progress and had great reviews. Why would anyone want to pay $20 for one of your photos? 2. Why do images hosted on your website have different watermarks? 3. Some of your images can be found on several other sites. How do you guarantee that your photographers own the copyright of the images they submit? 4. Your images are classified as Gold or Silver. What informs your classification? Is it the number of models in the photos, their cultural relevance, the image resolution, or the creativity/beauty of the work? Thanks in advance of your response.

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8yr ago

AfricanStockPhoto

Maker

@patrick_udeh good questions here Patrick! Our Gold offerings are those that are directly uploaded to AfricanStockPhoto by partner photographers, or in some cases, directly by us ourselves (my co-founder is a photographer). Silver, on the other hand, are images from a partner company that has given us API access to their catalogue. This explains why you might recognise some of the silver images from other stock image platforms, and why you may notice a different watermark on these. The discrepancy in pricing comes from this as well: because we purchase in bulk at their lowest available rate, the partner network charges us less per image than we give to our photographers, and we transfer this saving to the customer by maintaining the same margin on both sources of images. Our main focus is growing Gold (direct uploads), while Silver exists primarily to get our catalogue up in the early stages - it got us through the catch 22 that we couldn't launch before having some catalogue of images. As we grow our direct upload catalogue, and because there isn't that much African-focused imagery in the partner catalogue anyway, we expect Gold to quickly become the dominant, and maybe eventually exclusive, offering on the site.

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8yr ago

AfricanStockPhoto

Maker

@patrick_udeh Regarding why someone would pay $20 instead of using Nappy: Nappy is great and we're big fans of it, and same is true of other free stock photography sources like unsplash. Nappy's catalogue is incredibly high-quality, but is a bit limited in depth. This is a repeating problem across all stock imagery platforms; there isn't enough content out there about Africa. A quick search on Instagram shows that there's no lack of talented photographers, so why this big gap? We created a for-profit company that pays above average to contributors because we believe that the missing element in the ecosystem is a platform that lets African photographers and models earn money for the value they produce, and allowing these talents to be sustainable & income-generating. Unsplash does not have the depth of free African content that it could not because photographers don't know of it, but because they expect to be paid for the value they create. That explains why we charge and why we feel photographers should be paid, but we of course don't expect every customer to care about this in the same way we do, the customer is just looking for the highest quality option at the best price. Ultimately, our answer has to be "people pay for our content because you won't find a quality substitute elsewhere". It's an ambitious project and is early days yet; our collection is humble but growing. We believe that by our best photographers' work being paid for, and their contributions continuing to grow, we'll quickly get to the point that this statement will be true for more and more users.

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8yr ago

Nice Resume

Nice site! This is perfect for one of my projects. Your message above says we'll get 80% off of our first purchase and your checkout page says we'll get an 80% rebate off of our first image. CONSISTENT MESSAGING MATTERS GUYS! So since I used the promo code and paid full price, how do I get an 80% refund? Also, was it 80% off of just one image or the full first order? I would have bought more images if it was off of the first order.

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8yr ago

AfricanStockPhoto

Maker

@michaelfolling hey Michael, thanks for the feedback and apologies that the variation in wording caused confusion. I've emailed you with info on the rebate, it's already been issued. I'll clarify the wording in my post above, the in-app wording is right: it is a 80% rebate on the first image purchased. I'm sorry this poor communication on my behalf led you not to buy what you were intending, I'll send a follow-up email with a discount code you can use to complete your planned purchase. Sitati

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8yr ago

AfricanStockPhoto

Maker

*EDIT*: ( inb4 we're off the producthunt homepage 🙂 ) Use discount code PRODUCTHUNT at checkout to get 80% off in the form of a rebate on your first image. -- Hey, AfricanStockPhoto co-founder here 👋🏽 Thanks Lama for hunting us! My co-founder Dicky & I are working to bring the image of Africa up to date with the 21st century reality. It's easy enough to find images of lions and tribesmen or children in poverty, but not quite as easy to find other African realities, like businessmen sharing a quick lunch, or a co-founder filling in a producthunt form. Now that we're live, with hundreds of photographers across the continent, we'd love to get some feedback on the product from HN community. Thanks again Lama!

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8yr ago

Hustle Crew Academy

@sitatik Where has this been all my career? It's incredibly hard to find decent images for slide shows that don't portray people in the African continent like those we see in charity adverts. Can't wait to use these - will also be useful for social media accounts, when images are needed to support an article. 😊

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8yr ago

AfricanStockPhoto

Maker

@abadesi My co-founder's background is as a digital designer, and this business was basically launched out of the frustration he faced every day hunting down imagery for his work. Look forward to seeing your purchases 😉. Thanks for the excitement and encouraging feedback!

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8yr ago

I loved it... It very Very hard to get Images relevant to african market without Afican/american images.. I like that the images background are from here

Pros:

It very Very hard to get Images relevant to african market without Afican/american images.. I like that the images background are from here

Cons:

should have portal for African Photographers to sell there work

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8yr ago

AfricanStockPhoto

Maker

Thanks for the review Stephen! Glad you liked the service and our content. I should mention that there is in fact a portal for photographers to sell their work, that's how we get the content on there. If you want to check that out, just click the "sign up to sell" button at the top.

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8yr ago

Looking forward to watching their progress

Pros:

Solving a real gap in the market

Cons:

Could have more countries represented

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8yr ago

yes it looks like very unique and interesting photography that you are doing very impressive i am also giving the similar services in America you can see here on this link and see some more ideas about photography.

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5yr ago

It’s definitely something new!

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8yr ago

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