For a long time, I’ve enjoyed finding imagery via Veer.com. Well, ok, perhaps “enjoyed” isn’t quite the right word. Anyone who has spent an afternoon viewing 6,000-7,000 photographs of too young, too pretty and entirely too sharply or provocatively dressed men and women will know “enjoyment” isn’t what you feel. When you’re looking for images to represent the serious work of a remuneration committee, a bunch of permatanned 20- and 30-somethings grinning goofily at pie charts or all clustered around a single laptop (is technology rationed in stockphotoland?) doesn’t really work. Neither does the oh-so-typical “one person in the room who spotted the camera” group shot.
Aaaanyway. I could ramble for hours about the shortage of credible, 50ish, focused businessfolks in candids, and even longer on attempting to include Indians, Southern Europeans or non-US diversity in general, and briefly-but-passionately on the continued existence of the “pretty-young-woman-takes-orders-from-an-older-man” shot, but I wanted to write about Veer.
I liked their search engine system — it wasn’t perfect, but I liked it. I liked that I’d find images which weren’t in Getty’s vast library, images I could use on a regular basis. I liked the site design. I liked the super-friendly European telephone support people, who were always able to solve the problem (and several of whom sounded…rawr). I liked their crazy side projects, the blog, the merch, the various silly things they did in addition to the main type-n-images focus. And then they were acquired by Corbis.
Fast forward a little while, and the dismantling of Veer as it was appears close to complete. Don’t get me wrong, Veer.com is still there, and it still has much the same site design. But Corbis have apparently decided that Veer is to be its *budget* brand, for microstock and the like. They’ve even introduced Veer “credits”. Example: a search today, looking for technology images with a Middle East slant wasn’t especially productive. Even with the “illustration” option unticked, it was about 50% cheapy map outlines and flag buttons made in photoshop.
I guess that means searching only on Corbis.com in future. Which is fine, but I *liked* Veer, for more than just the list of things above. It seemed small, and a bit personal, and a bit creative, and it was useful to me and I liked it. And now it’s not anymore.
Valid business reasons, economic downturn, consolidation in the market, blah blah I DON’T CARE. I won’t be weeping into my whiskey tonight, but my image searching duties are now even less appealing.