Malfunctive

Do you own or are you employed by a stock photography site such as iStockPhoto, ShutterStock, 123rf, etc? Do you know of anyone who fits this description?

If so, can we set up a meeting during which I try to convince you to build an API so that bloggers can preview stock photography in their posts before they buy that photography or publish the post?

Here’s what I imagine the workflow would feel like:

I come up with an awesome concept for a post (like this one!) and I write some stuff and then I go looking for imagery. I show up at the awesome “Lenstrument.com” stock photo site. I forage for photos (maybe I should have called it photoforage.com)

Once there I start selecting photos and throwing them into a cart or lightbox or whatever. Here are some typical lightboxes:

 

 

Up to this point, everything I’ve described is simply my current process. Here’s the magic:

I go to my WordPress post and I click the StockPhoto_Preview Plugin button. Maybe this is a universal plugin that talks to every stock photo site that opens an API or maybe I have to choose which store my photos are coming from today. I select 1 or 3 or all of the photos that I want to try out in that position and the plugin drops in a slideshow displaying the images (suitably watermarked) that only works while the post is unpublished.

So I flip through the slide show and figure out which image I like. Maybe futz with dimensions that would work best, etc. Rotate? Simulated crop?

Then I buy the photo  I choose.  I can go back to the stock photo site to purchase but preferably there’s a buy button in the plugin. Better yet, why can’t I search from the plugin?  Either way hopefully the image gets shoved into my WordPress media library right after the transaction clears. Really seamless trying and buying. Isn’t this the kind of thing the we invented e-commerce for?

I’ll make you a deal. You open up the API, I’ll author the plugin. Fair warning: if you don’t I or someone else might just build a stock photo site (photoforage? Lenstrument?!) on top of the The OpenPhoto Project (Hi Jaisen & Team!) and ramp the competition.