A  digital revolution is sweeping through the photography business. long fortold and slow in coming we are seeing innovations which will change the picture business forever. Generally picture libraries have been a cottage business, often named after the single photographer or collector who started them up: Robert Harding, Mary Evans, for instance.  And they grew haphazardly to represent stables of photographers.  Sometimes libraries specialise:  The Natural History Photographic Agency tells you all you need to know about that particular library, sometimes they are generalists, having all sorts of different images and servicing a wide range of markets, from books and magazines to television programmes.

But what they had in common was the medium of delivery: transparencies (‘slides”) and photographic prints.  And these were the backbone of the business: you ordered a selection of transparencies for your project, and they arrived by courier or registered post.  So after you’d finished you had a huge pile of material to sort and return.  And then the libraries would have to refile them after the client had sent them back.  So there was always a massive mound of returns, as even the smallest photo-library has hundreds of thousands of images. 

This is costly, and inefficient, and there is always the problem that perhaps the image you want is with another client, or the library has to make another “dupe” (duplicate) from the original. This consumes vital time.

And naturally you may want to order images from a library in another country, so you have to factor in the time taken to send a package around the world, not to mention getting lost, misdirected or held up in customs, invariably when the deadline is looming.

Digital imaging is changing this.  Already for sports and news photography, digital cameras are in wide use, which means pictures can be transmitted  to the picture desk instantly.  In other fields digital imaging is catching on, and you are now offered digital files by ISDN, or “burnt” onto CD-roms.  With deadlines getting shorter, having a picture sent over the phone lines, rather than having to risk a courier being stranded in traffic makes sense.  And no returns to process for either the picture researcher or the library.

However there is a downside to all this: firstly the quality of a transparency is a known quantity.  You can just put it on a lightbox and tell.  A digital file could be badly scanned, or the wrong resolution or format.  So there’s more technology to go wrong. And also the photo-libraries are understandably worried that they would send a digital file for one purpose, and an unscrupulous (or just careless) user would steal it and use it without paying.  Newspaper corporations tend to be particularly heinous in this regard, and it is easy to strip out any copyright or credit information from  a file and then reproduce it. There are some remedies: there are two systems of invisibly “watermarking” digital files so copyright information can be subsequently retrievied:  one British, Signum Designs, and one American: Digimarc.  But these have not yet been widely adopted.

But the advantages of going digital outweigh the disadvantages, so gradually most photolibraries are inching towards digitizing their collections.  And I mean inching, because purely from the practical point of view most libraries have extensive collections and it would take a lot of time to digitize the lot: if you have 100,000 images and it takes 3 minutes to scan one and five minutes to keyword them for the search engine, then you’re looking at 6.4 years to do the lot. Not counting tea breaks. So most libraries are operating on a dual system, of sending out “hard copies” where necessary, as well as digital images.

But the big impetus in this area comes from two giants, both new players in the field:  Corbis, owned by Microsoft, which includes New York giant The Bettmann Archive and Getty Images, who own Photodisk, the Hulton historical collection, Tony Stone (travel and advertising images) and Allsport.  Both have been buying other collections like no tomorrow, and have ambitions to become a one-stop digital shop for all your picture requirements, sort of like an out-of-town supermarket for images,  which leaves the rest of the photographic libraries feeling like grocers on the high street: looking unneasily over their shoulders: already the regular business they used to supply images for corporate reports and holiday company brochures has been crushed by “copyright free” images from companies like Photodisc and Corel. No-one wants to pay repeated licence fees for an image of the Eiffel tower when they can buy it and then use it for free. 

The market penetration of the giants has been slower than they originally thought: often clients liked handling tranparencies and were reluctant to change, as were art buyers and picture researchers, who felt little need to change from a known quantity to an unknown, especially if it might cost you your job: you can imagine the fallout if an ad campaign went to press with an inadequate image.  On the other hand the ease of use, and speed, not to mention the 24 hour availability of images from a website, has meant that more users are coming round to using digital formats.  You can download low-resolution “layout” images and then when you’re ready, buy the reproduction-quality high-res image and have it transmitted by ISDN or CD-rom.  It’s efficient. So even the smaller libraries are creating websites, and the medium to larger ones are investigating e-commerce databases, where a client can use a search engine to find images they want, pay for it on credit card then download the files all without needing any human intervention: a big plus for smaller libraries with few staff.

Is the advent of giants such as Corbis going to drive out the smaller operations?  Yes and no.  The generalists will have a hard time, but the specialists, whose staff expertise is invaluable to the researcher, will  - I believe - find that the internet opens up new markets which they couldn’t penetrate before, and globally, the best and most efficient libraries will thrive. 
If they are prepared to invest in the technology, so yet again those with techno-savvy will push ahead of the stick-in-the-muds.  Though with the great amount of orthodox photographic materials stored in libraries I don’t think we’re going to be demonstrating against the extinction of the transparency for a good while yet.