paid

Meta's promised paid verification program is rolling out to Facebook and Instagram today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Instagram channel.

While Twitter did not have the smoothest rollout of its paid "verification" badges, Instagram might be toying with rolling such a feature out too if a few small references in its code are any indication of its plans.

Facebook and Instagram have been vocally against any attempts to curtail its apps from tracking users, but with the launch of iOS 14.5, the company has taken that up a notch by subtly threatening to charge its users for access to its networks if they choose to turn app tracking off.

Yesterday, Topaz Labs—the software company behind popular photo editing plugins and software like DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI, and Gigapixel AI—announced that it will start charging for product upgrades. Users are understandably upset.

I recently saw yet another story on Facebook where a retoucher got screwed by a client. It’s always sad to see this happen. Over the years, I have managed to build a ripping-off-proof on-boarding and payment workflow to make sure I never end up in that kind of situation.

Flickr is bringing back Pro memberships. Today the photo sharing service announced that paid subscription plans are returning for both existing and new members. This change is in response to "a high amount of requests" from photographers in the Flickr community.

More than a few articles have been written on the detrimental effects of working for free in the photo industry. Unsurprisingly, the same issue has raged on for years in the writing community. But I didn’t expect to see the issue percolate in my Facebook feed in relation to the circus industry.

Editor’s note: This video contains strong language that is not suitable for some environments. In 2007, famed science fiction …

The popular wedding blog The Wedding Chicks has become the focus of much of the photo community's ire today after an article on the popular photography blog Fstoppers brought attention to one of their business practices. Namely: that they offer "social media packages" in which photographers can pay the blog to have their work featured on the Wedding Chicks Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter.

Not too long ago, I was approached by a newspaper (Journal Le Droit, a large daily newspaper distributing print in the Ottawa-Hull area) asking if I would allow them to print a few of my pictures in an upcoming special feature on a nearby town, Rockland, Ontario. Having photographed much of Rockland in the past three years, I gladly accepted and figured that I could somewhat benefit from some exposure.

Just to make sure, I asked if they were offering monetary compensation. They responded that a photo-credit would be placed at the bottom of the image in lieu of payment. Why not?

I’ve got a little story for you today, and a valuable lesson for photographers everywhere. On the Monday before last, a post that I wrote the week before started to go viral. I was receiving more traffic than I had ever experienced before, and from sites that I had never heard of. Fantastic. Only, along with the good news, we have some bad news.