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BY ROHN ENGH

Join the photo-textcentric movement. Next time you’re on a vacation, take a lot of pictures, but also take notes.

What is the name of that historic site (spell it right), that nightclub, or baseball park? What are the other recreations in the town you are visiting? Using a brochure from the Chamber of Commerce as a guide or the postcard counter in the local drug store, capture your images with your digital camera.

Again, take notes, the more the better. Who? What? Why? Where? When?.

The answers to theses questions will be required as captions by many of your clients, photo editors, and researchers. And they surely will be needed when you “keyword” each of your images once you upload them to your personal site or to a photo-textcentric site like PhotoSourceBANK. Making your photos accessible to buyers in this way (listing them on a textcentric site) is much more efficient than the former way of doing business, where you waited for a photobuyer to view your online store, your exhibit, or Internet catalog, looking for a specific picture for one of their projects.

Most commercial online stock photo agencies rarely accept obscure images that don’t promise multiple sales. Nevertheless, the multimillion dollar editorial stock photo industry photobuyers are always seeking hard-to-find images for their magazines, textbooks, TV documentaries, and book publishing projects.

This new way of searching means the buyers come to you. You can afford to sit and wait for buyers to come to you because your promotional investment is no more than your cost to put your keywords and phrases up on the Internet.

It’s a new way of selling photos, thanks to search engines such as Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and others.

And the prices are right. No need to sell your photos as royalty-free where you say goodbye to image and sell it for only pennies. Instead, buyers who come to you are in great need of your photos and they are willing to pay $100 to $200 for one-time use of your images (all rights return to you). How do I know this? Because that’s the figure they consistently quote when they list their photo needs on our PhotoDaily. And, that’s a lot more than you’d receive than if you’d place your images with iStock or similar royalty-free sites.

The Internet has allowed the independent stock photographer market to explode. It’s not uncommon for stock photographers to corner their local market and branch out to sell their photos worldwide, thanks to this new photo-textcentric approach.

PHOTO-TEXTCENTRIC: Search engines are at the forefront of this new way of marketing your photos on the Internet. Looking for something? A photoproduct to buy? The email address of a photographer you’d like to find? A photo of elephants taking a mud bath in Kenya (a typical listing)?

You need only to type a phrase (text) using the keywords of your choice into the search bar at Yahoo, Google or other similar search engine, plus the word photosource. You’ll find the information in seconds.

“Photo-Textcentric” is not a word you’ll find in today’s dictionary, but next year you probably will. I just made it up. It seems to capture the speedy method for finding the source of a photo through searching by means of text rather than pictures.

Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International, the stock photography online meeting place, and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. He is also the author of Sell & Resell Your Photos: Learn How to Sell Your Pictures Worldwide.