DeepMeta 4 - Features & Planning

From Preview to Release

In our Blog post Announcing DeepMeta 4 (tip: read that one first if you haven't already), we presented the Preview version of DeepMeta with very limited functionality.

As you can see below, we've been adding many features since, and it's safe to say that the Royalty Statements, Statistics and Portfolio functionality has finished the Test phase and can be used with confidence.

The DeepMeta 4 Preview functionality has been so well received by all of you, we're grateful to all who have taken the time to try out the many new features!

Over the first months of 2024, we've had a very active cycle of user feedback, with changes and additions to the way Sales Statistics are presented. We still have a healthy list of user proposals, and you can rely on us to implement many of them later this year.

Royalty Statements

The Royalty Statement section allows you to upload your monthly Royalty Statements and shows a quick overview of downloads and royalty for each month.

You have full control over your uploaded Statements. Upload all the ones you have, to get a full overview of your Sales records. At any time you can delete uploaded Statements, selectively for a month or all at once.

Full details can be viewed per contract, for each of your Statements in the list:

Sales List

The Sales List section provides a full list of all your sales for a month or lifetime of your Royalty Statements, with Filtering and Search. Switch between "Compact" and "Detailed" view as needed.

Sales Stats

The Sales Stats section provides a quick overview of your sales for a month or over the full lifetime of your statements.

Several types of charts, maps and lists are available:

You can use a faceted filter to delve deeper into your sales charts

Clicking any of the items brings up the Sales Detail Page for that Asset:

Sales Trends

The Sales Trends section shows the evolution of sales for specific criteria over time. You can switch between "Month" and "Year" view, "$", "DL" or "RPD" (Return Per Download) and select the type of chart.

As with all selections and preferences in DeepMeta, they are preserved for your next visit(s) to the site.

First Time Sales

The First Time Sales section shows thumbnails for assets that sold for the very first time in a given month. This allows you to assess which of your newer work is catching on.

HOT 25

The HOT 25 "hit parade" section shows the evolution of your top sellers over time. A very visual way to see shifts of successful assets over the months or years.

Collections

To get deeper insights in the performance of your portfolio, we've added the Collections functionality, allowing you to group your assets, so you can get statistics across Collections. How you organize your Collections is entirely up to you: by theme, shoot, model, or perhaps all of these.

Users of DeepMeta 3 have been using Boards to do this. A board is Getty Images name for a Collection, and these can be created on the customer-facing websites gettyimages.com and istock.com. Just like DeepMeta 3 , DeepMeta 4 can import these Boards from either or both websites and convert them into Collections. You can do this as often as you like. DeepMeta keeps track of which Boards were used for which Collections and will update accordingly.

Portfolio

To assist in creating Collections, we've added the Portfolio section. This is not just the list of assets that appear in your Royalty Statements (i.e. just the assets that have had sales up to now), but it lists all your assets available for sale on Getty Images and/or iStock. I.e.: your entire portfolio(s).

Syncing a portfolio from the Getty server is a surprisingly difficult thing to do, and no other party, other than Getty Images themselves have attempted to do this. Many contributors have their portfolio spread across multiple "artist" names, and there are different mechanisms to get hold of portfolios, depending on whether they are smaller than 10,000 assets, between 10,000 and 100,000 assets and larger than 100,000 assets. Yes, some of you have been pretty busy uploading, it seems ;)

We're really proud to have succeeded in this task. This feature alone has taken up hundreds of hours of development and testing time. I think it was all worth it!

Filter the items in the collection list and click the "Select" button to select one or more assets. You can then add these to multiple collections at once:

Networking

As you may know, DeepMeta has chosen creativ.zone (also developed by us) as its technological platform. It provides networking and promotional features for creatives, like yourselves.

Over the last few weeks we have stealthily added DeepMeta support for some of these networking features. Now it's time to present them...

Your Profile page

When you registered at deepmeta.creativ.zone, you were able to choose a name for your own "zone". This is basically the name of your public profile page. If you chose "frankyfineart" as your zone name, your public Profile page is at https://frankyfineart.creativ.zone

This is similar to a mini-website, such as offered by platforms like Linktree, Biosites and dozens of clones. You can share this URL with others, and use your creativ.zone Profile page as a website, to showcase not only your stock photography, but other work as well.

Here's a shameless plug to my own Profile page, not because I'm such a brilliant creative, but rather because I've used all the currently available features of creativ.zone to showcase my work: iStock/Getty Portfolio, Image Gallery, Blog and FAQ. You can do the exact same thing. For free.

Your latest accepted Getty or iStock assets are automatically shown in your public Portfolio (obviously without any sales info: these are and will always remain private to you). The public portfolio is very much similar to what you see at gettyimages.com or istock.com when you enter your artist name in the search bar.

Only, here your work is shown in the context of your own online Profile site, where you can present yourself and your other work to the visitor. It's all about creating a more personal relationship with the visitor. If you want to read more about the philosophy behind this, please read the blog post DeepMeta 4 and creativ.zone

When the visitor clicks on one of your stock Assets, they are shown an Asset Detail Page, just like on the Getty site, where the visitor can find more info about the asset and click through to the Getty or iStock site to license the image. This is basically just another way for potential buyers to find your stock work on the internet. For Getty Images, they are additional ways that can lead to the potential license sales. It's a win-win.

We've made sure that each of your assets has complete and detailed SEO (Search Engine Optimization) metadata, so that Google shows your work as properly copyrighted along with a link to the Getty page where the work can be licensed and a link to a watermarked thumbnail. Here's an example of the metadata presented to Google and other search engines for a portfolio stock image:

Browse Zones

This section shows a list of all Zones for which the user has taken the effort to add a short description, uploaded a profile picture or has set their location (Settings | Zone). Users who have done none of these, do not appear in the list.

From the shown Zone panels, you can click through to the profile page of that user and view their portfolio along with any other info they have chosen to share, like Blog posts, image uploads from their non-stock work and maybe an FAQ (Frequently Used Questions) section.

If you'd like to appear in this list, click your profile picture (or the generic avatar icon) at the top right of the DeepMeta window, then click the "Settings" button, select the "Zone" tab and fill in the bio/description field. You can also add a location and a profile picture.

Zone Map

This is another view of the Zones, this time shown on the world map. Only users who have entered their location (Settings | Zone) are shown on this map. Click a marker to view the info panel where you can click through to the user's profile page.

Member Feed

This is a feed of the latest accepted uploads from our DeepMeta users. You can filter by any combination of Photos, Video and or Illustrations. It's simply fun to see what other contributors are up to. Here too, clicking an asset opens the detail page, where a button clicks through to the Getty or iStock site where the Asset can be licensed.

Privacy

All info shown in these networking sections is publicly available elsewhere on the internet and can also be seen on the Getty / iStock websites. They are meant to help you promote your work to potential buyers. If you prefer not to occur in any of these pages, you can set your zone to "Private" in the Settings | Privacy section. You can change this at any time:

Click on your profile picture at the top right of the DeepMeta window:

Click the "Settings" button:

Click the "Privacy" menu option and select your preferred privacy setting:

Planned networking features

Public collections

If you've taken the trouble to create a number of Collections for your stock assets, here's where you will be able to put them to good use as well. As you may have noticed, a Collection can be private or public. We'll add functionality to your profile portfolio page to have it show all your public collections. This can help your potential customers to find your niches more quickly. It gives you full control over how you present your Portfolio.

Asset Annotations

One feature that iStock used to have, was where we could constantly "groom" our portfolio, by updating our assets with improved descriptions and keywords. It's still possible to update our accepted assets by creating a support ticket, but that's a lot of housekeeping.

DeepMeta will allow you to annotate your assets at any time, with additional descriptions and tags. They won't affect your portfolio at the Getty / iStock sites, but will be shown in your public portfolio on your Profile page here at the site. If Google picks these up, you may gain an additional sale or two, who knows. It's all about directing more potential buyers to your Getty/iStock portfolio.

Social Features

Over time, those of us who have been active on the Getty forums, have built a certain network of fellow contributors who they know and respect.

DeepMeta will introduce social features, like being able to follow other members, "Like" their work as we see it coming through the feed, and message them, possibly for help or collaboration.

Again, this is all optional. You can opt out of any of this by setting your account to Private. We'll offer more fine-grained control over time.

Planning for May - October 2024

Statistics

We've temporarily stopped adding features and improvements to the current Statistics and Portfolio functionality. Further suggestions are more than welcome. They are carefully registered for evaluation once we do the next round of changes in this area.

Urgent functionality

As explained in the Blog post DeepMeta 4 and creativ.zone, the clock is ticking. By the end of August 2024 (at the earliest, but probably a few months later), Microsoft will discontinue support for the development tools we use for the DeepMeta 3 MacOS version. This means we need to prioritize making DeepMeta 4 feature-complete, so it can replace DeepMeta 3 for MacOS when needed. Note that the Windows version of DeepMeta 3 is not affected and will remain available for the foreseeable future.

Batches and Uploads

The planning is to continue to use web technology wherever possible, also for Batch and Upload functionality. It was such a refreshing experience to build DeepMeta 4 with web technology so far, with instant fixes of bugs, without having to spend half a day deploying software for Mac & Windows, and hoping everyone will install the update, as well as hoping virus scanners don't block the new version again, etc. Genuinely a breeze of fresh air!

This is the planned list of upcoming features, in chronological order:

• •Allow you to link one or more Getty / iStock ESP accounts. This means you don't need multiple DeepMeta accounts for this. You can easily switch between your Getty / iStock accounts and manage your uploads here, all in one place.
• •Sync your Batches and Uploads, similar to how your Portfolio is currently synced. You can view and get notified of your latest approvals, revisions and rejections.
• •If you like, you'll be able to convert one or more of your batches into DeepMeta Collections
• •Edit existing Batches and Uploads: title, description, country, keywords, etc.
• •Upload new assets from your browser (a dedicated Mac / Windows app will come later)
• •Assign one or more other users as Collaborators. Using granular access control, you'll be able to grant them access for just keywording, for title and description, for submitting, etc. At a later stage we'll add statistics and logging, which will allow you to assess the work done by the collaborator, which you can use to determine how much you will pay them out. Collaboration tools were probably the most requested feature for DeepMeta 3. Many of you have your keywording done by external parties, so you can focus on shooting and editing.
• •Sync Briefs, sort and filter them, so you only see the ones that apply to your situation. Convert a brief into a Batch if you decide to participate in the Brief.
• •Once all above functionality is implemented in the browser, we will create dedicated Windows / Mac apps that give access to this functionality and complement it with background and batch uploading of your assets to the Getty server, just like DeepMeta v3 does. We still see the offline / background / batch uploading - using an app - as the corner stone of added value offered by DeepMeta.

Please note that the exact order of items may shift a bit, but at least you can now get a feeling of where we're heading. The masterplan ;)

As always, if you have questions or remarks, the best way is to post in the DeepMeta thread of the Getty Images forum, or contact us directly.