Definitely a solid idea. Seems very similar to http://500px.com : where I have personally bought a few photos. One thing that kills their utility is the Search function is pretty useless. So, take a lesson if you have limited resources : make your search the most badass image search ever because users can't find relevant photos, they ain't buying nothin'
Might be a good idea to glance at how they are rolling and yoink some ideas. As they do a lot of things well on the site.
Comparatively, I dig how straight-forward PicFair is.
A few friendly comments :
Why do I have to search before I get filter controls? I think the initial sidebar might be better off showing me those and maybe just sliding a short and sweet one-liner right above the photo grid.
In general, I wish the tags and such were surfaced higher as I wanted ways that did not involve searching to browse but I really had to force myself to click around to find a way. Also, it would be cool if when I clicked a color from below the tags if it loaded the color like it was a tag on a browse page.
But, added to my list of photo resources!
This is my first non-US investment and I'm particularly enamored with it because not only is it giving power back to photographers, but it's also founded by a guy who was a total neophyte until he taught himself to code via General Assembly (another investment of mine - full disclosure).
It's incredibly cool to see an investment empower a person to build a platform to then go and empower even more people.
Very well-designed.
I'm not sure what inspired this but there have been several photo-related hunts posted recently. Here are a few since yesterday:
- Twenty20 - Create your own Instagram storefront in a few clicks
- Splashbase - Search & discover free, public domain, hi res photos
- Foap - Authentic royalty free stock photos
Thanks for the nice comments, guys.
Bit of background to Picfair, I taught @benjilanyado front-end and Rails while I was freelancing for General Assembly London about 18 months ago. During that time, he was working away on Picfair while I was running an education startup. Now the teacher and the student are reunited! Learn to code, it's very useful!
Pipe Cube
Business Dad with Alexis Ohanian
Product Hunt
MyTimeZone
SuperHi
My Golden Ticket