Background: Alamy currently has about 3 million images online from 4600 photographers and 296 agencies. By comparison, all of the four marketplaces we are comparing in this article currently have less than 100,000 images online. All five online marketplaces (Alamy included) do not require an exclusive agreement, and we've noticed many image suppliers are represented by two or more of these marketplaces (and often with the same images). We'll now attempt to offer some overall comparisons and unique features that these four online marketplaces offer. NOTE: Your editor has placed images with all four online marketplaces, and has interviewed contributors at each marketplace to help with this comparison.

Another feature The Stock Solution plans to add this Fall is a Copyright Tracking service for monitoring unauthorized uses of their photographer's rights managed images. TSS used to use a similar service (BayTSP) a few years ago, and found it very effective, but that company no longer tracks images. This new Copyright Tracking service, employs an image recognition technology which converts each of the photographer's thumbnail images into a digital fingerprint, capturing the unique features of that image. This digital fingerprint is then used to compare the photographer's image with images that are currently on the Web. Smart crawlers then scan commercial Web sites, looking for matching images appearing on those Web sites. The results found by the crawlers are compared with the fingerprint database of the photographer's images.

TSS' experience has shown that unauthorized use and re-use of rights managed images is quite rampant, especially in the advertising industry. Art directors and photo buyers play "musical chairs" so often in this industry that advertising agencies and their clients rarely have accurate records as to what limited rights they have purchased. Most of the infringements TSS has discovered in the past are unintentional. TSS' negotiating skills have been successful in collecting many additional use fees from unintentional infringers. Those infringers who are not cooperative are subject to the full remedies provided by copyright registration.